Experimenting with innovation processes: the case of reinventing a museum through collaboration

This paper explores how experimenting with collaborative processes contributes to reinventing the purpose and practices of an organization. Based on a case study of the Insectarium of Montréal, we focus on the 2-year collaborative process orchestrated by the director, involving employees, experts and visitors. Our findings show several organizational implications of engaging in this type of experimentation: specifically, beyond enabling the collective generation of new ideas, experimenting through collaboration is an excellent opportunity to renew the organization’s practices and support the development of a reflexive leadership. This suggests that despite the inherent challenges associated with organizational experiments, there are clear benefits of engaging in such experiments to stimulate innovation.
CERN IdeaSquare Journal of Experimental Innovation, Vol. 1 No. 2 (2017): Special Issue: "Experiments in an organizational context"