Digitisation of Cultural Heritage and Business Model Innovation: The Case of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence

Recently, digitization has attracted increasing interest not only in museology and computer science, but also in economics and managerial literature. Scholars have tried to analyse how technological innovation is reshaping the role and mission of museums as producers and distributors of cultural content and investigate the new business model that emerges. The present work aims to investigate the adoption of ICT and innovation processes in museums, and their interaction dynamics between curators and technology developers. We analyse an Italian successful museum case study, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, where digitization has been developed through a long-term partnership among the local University, a creative ICT enterprise and other technical partners. Data collection integrates some semi-structured interviews with information from websites, documents, publications, and the museum’s institutional communication. The main results show that this case can be defined as a Virtual Value Chain Model according to a curatorial approach at European level.