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RESEARCH & BENCHMARKING
Museum Innovation Barometer
Since 2016 · Ongoing
The international study measuring how museums actually innovate — and where the sector is heading next.
Innovation is unstable by nature.
How do you define museum innovation? Is it flagship projects, or the learning curve of museum teams? Cutting-edge technology, or the capability to maintain and improve the tools you already have? Innovation resists a single metric — which is exactly why it needs to be measured properly.
The Museum Innovation Barometer takes the time to survey, analyse, and break it down.
THE FIRST GENERATION · 2016–2021
A decade of measuring the sector.
The original Barometer — published in editions in 2018, 2019, and 2021 — built comprehensive pictures of technology adoption and innovation capacity in museums. The 2021 edition alone gathered responses from more than 200 museums across 39 countries, capturing both the pandemic's acceleration of digital practice and the sector's three-year strategic plans across visitor experience, digital infrastructure, data collection, and revenue generation.
Trusted beyond our own community.
The Barometer has been featured by NEMO (Network of European Museum Organisations), covered in international sector press, and cited in peer-reviewed academic research on digital transformation in museums — independent confirmation that MIB data has become a reference point for the field.
2026: THE REDESIGNED BAROMETER
We didn't just update the questionnaire. We rebuilt the instrument.
The first generation of the Barometer measured a sector discovering digital. That era is over — and a study built for it would measure the wrong things. So we redesigned the Museum Innovation Barometer from the ground up: new methodology, new question architecture, and a focus shifted from which technologies museums adopt to how capable institutions are of innovating at all.
The redesigned Barometer examines the realities museums face now:
AI adoption & governance
Data maturity
Organisational innovation capacity
Ambition vs. human infrastructure
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