From time to time I invite guestbloggers to write about their expert knowledge. Today I have the pleasure to introduce you to Harry Verwayen from Europeana.eu, which aims to make European heritage openly available.

Harry has tirelessly advanced business model thinking in the (digital) cultural heritage sector. On this blog he is presenting the results of a new report. Harry, the floor is yours:

When large, forward thinking companies such Google are prepared to face huge lawsuits over the digitization of old books, that is a sure-tell sign that you find yourself in a sweet spot for business model innovation.

Not surprisingly, libraries and museums are pondering over ways to capture some of that value that comes with reaching a whole new audience. Over the past decade, museums, archives and other cultural heritage institutions have started digitizing important cultural heritage collections on an unprecedented scale. Literally millions of artifacts such as books, film, audio and even clay tablets have been digitized in order to bridge the divide between our analogue pasts and the digital futures.  Based on this material these institutions-  that were originally designed to safeguard our heritage-  have started experimenting with new digital services, aiming to bring this material closer to a group of people that would otherwise never visit these temples of wisdom.

However, there is an increasing recognition that these digital services are not yet perfectly suited to the needs of today’s users, who expect to be able to request, retrieve and adapt cultural heritage content- any content for that matter-  through popular interactive sites like YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and Wikipedia. This is a step that requires true business model innovation. A research team from thinktank Knowledgeland and the DEN Foundation in the Netherlands used the canvas to create a common language as the start of our investigations.

Old model

We found that the old, analogue model looked something like this: the value proposition was primarily based on ‘managing’ and safeguarding heritage for the (distant) future. In this model the clients are the government and professionals such as historians that are catered to through a building and professional curators. Cost and revenue streams are transparent and stable, practically all key activities could be carried out as part of the core business of the institutions, no partners needed.

New Model

With digitization the model changes, radically. The institutions still need to perform their management tasks, but completely new value propositions are suddenly within reach: The core mission of most of these institutions is to make  our heritage available as broadly as possible. With the variable costs of distribution falling close to zero this means that in theory all this material could be made accessible through a licensing system such as Creative Commons to the general public. Granted, there may not be a huge uptake on some of this ephemeral material, but if you still believe in the Long Tail you could imagine that at least some of this material will find a new audience.

Both the institutions themselves and policymakers consider the broad accessibility of cultural heritage materials to be an important contribution to our common social capital. But, when innovating the model, various barriers are encountered: while more than 26% of our heritage in Europe is currently digitized only a very small percentage (less than 1% by my estimates) is available where the value creation would be greatest, in the networked environment. After several rounds of iteration we came to the conclusion that there are four main problem areas that we needed to delve deeper into: Organization, ICT infrastructure, Copyright and Revenue Models.

We quickly found out that the traditional instrumentarium (bring together expert groups, read and write thick reports) alone would not do the trick. The subjects were simply too large and too complex. We then asked the people from JAM visual thinking to help us out. Tother with them we shaped our expert meetings into creative sessions supported by strong visuals that were constantly adapted to our latest thinking.

Revenue Models

We figured out that from a legal perspective there are four distinctive ways to make heritage available, represented by the four rings in the picture. In the inner rings the material is presented within the walls of the institutions. In the two outer rings the material is presented in the online environment. The further you get out, the more the material is shared in the networked environment with explicit re-use rights. We argue that the value for the users becomes greater when the material is cut loose from institutional boundaries and have tried to categorize ways to generate revenues in all four rings.

Although we are still far from reaching our goal of creating the ubiquitous, open, virtual library that is necessary to support the knowledge economy, we feel that we have at least been able to map out the issues and some paths towards solutions. This has resulted in a publication that I would like to bring to your attention, which can be downloaded here. Your comments are more than welcome, and I appreciate you spreading this in your network!

Special thanks to Alex and the team for continuously supporting this initiative and inspiring us to continue approaching these issues as designers.

Best,
Harry Verwayen <hverwayen@ziggo.nl>