Visitor-sensing: Involving the crowd in cultural heritage organizations

As organizations are increasingly involving individuals across their boundaries in the generation of new knowledge, crowd involvement can also be beneficial to cultural heritage organizations. We argue that in an “Open Innovation in Science” approach, visitors can contribute to generate new scientific knowledge concerning their behavior and preferences, by which museum managers can re-design the cultural offerings of their institutions in ways that generate major economic and social impacts. Accordingly, we advance visitor-sensing as a novel framework in which museum managers leverage digital technologies to collect visitors’ ideas, preferences, and feedback in order to improve path design and the organization of artwork in exhibitions, and to shape a more satisfying museum experience for visitors. We contend that visitor-sensing has the potential to yield higher numbers of visitors, with positive impacts in terms of increased revenues and increased literacy of the general public, thus benefiting the economic and social sustainability of cultural organizations towards the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals outlined in the Agenda 2030.