Do museums foster innovation through engagement with the cultural and creative industries?

The recent narrative on museums as catalysts of innovation and growth considers
their relations with other cultural and creative industries (CCIs) to be very important.
We argue that most relations museums establish with CCI firms and institutions
are unlikely to produce strong positive externalities that make the latter more innovative.
To prove this claim, we propose a conceptual framework qualifying projectbased
and supply chain relations between museums and CCIs as either strong, moderate,
or weak links, according to their potential in terms of knowledge spillovers
from museums to CCIs. We apply this taxonomy to data collected from 261 Polish
museums. Our findings indicate that strong links are outnumbered by moderate and
weak ones. We then suggest that the traditional missions of museums, in particular
education and conservation, need to be more thoroughly assessed in terms of their
direct and indirect contributions in order to fully capture the impact of museums on
innovation in the wider economy.