Sustaining Growth through Business Model Evolution: The Industrialization of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (1986–2012)

Abstract

In a changing context in which many creative organizations navigate, arts museums struggle to remain faithful to their traditional missions and at the same time to adapt their business model, enabling them to grow. How does a museum renew components of its business model to become part of a creative industry, i.e., an organization that simultaneously maintains the creation of artistic value and the capture of this value on a market? In this article, we study the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA)—a museum that has experienced outstanding growth since the 1980s—which has regularly adapted its business model in order to sustain growth. We identify three major periods of leadership and business model evolution. Beyond endless definitional debates on creative industries, this article unveils actual industrialization processes of an arts museum.

Keywords:

• business model
• fine arts museum
• growth
• industrialization
• longitudinal single case study