The Knowledge Marketing revolution at (of all places) museums
April 2001

Gary Hamel's provocative new book on corporate strategy, Leading the Revolution (Harvard Business School Press) contrasts failing companies that venerate the past and can't abandon out-of-date business models with successful companies that avoid irrelevance by dreaming, exploring, inventing. The latter are his heroes, the pioneers who invent the future and create new wealth by abandoning accepted strategies and becoming profoundly different.

Why not, he challenges us in one example, imagine a dramatically different form of business education? A revolution from within the staid, existing framework won't work: attempts to ally traditional-thinking schools would get bogged down by intractable issues and squabbling. The only alternative is to establish a new venture built from a completely new model: skim the best and brightest from the top business schools and leading consulting companies, offer them top salaries and equity, and build a first-rate team of researchers around faculty, dramatically raising their research output. The collective faculty "brand," well-supported by bountiful knowledge products that would make even Harvard Business School Publishing swoon, would outshine the brand of any offline university. And, best of all, their product service could actually help meet the huge global demand for high quality business education and actually help speed up the pace of economic development in some parts of the world.

Hamel wants traditionally-minded firms like business schools to look beyond their own resources and markets and to imagine new resource combinations that could create new markets and new services. He thinks coalitions can help bring a highly risky project into the realm of feasibility. And using the broad resources of the coalition, the new entity can extract broader and deeper insights from information that help do "cool new things" for customers.

So what does Hamel's book have to do with museums? The world of business education may not yet be ready for Hamel's revolutionary thinking, but some key players in the museum business are already implementing his advice. Hamel disciples will be interested in Bernard Reilly's article, "Merging or Diverging? New International Business Models from the Web, " published in the January-February, 2001 issue of Museum News (Journal of the American Association of Museums).

According to Reilly (Director of Research at the Chicago Historical Society), a new business model is emerging for museums, one that is moving far beyond the limited reach of the dominant traditional model. In his view, the 21st century museum will be an amalgamation of cultural organizations with very different missions, a completely new entity with tremendous ability to reach out to a vastly expanded audience with an array of new services and products.

The early leader appears to be Fathom Knowledge Network (fathom.com), recently founded by the partnership of Columbia University, New York Public Library, Smithsonian's National Museum of National History, Cambridge University Press, the British Library, and the London School of Economics. Other members include Britain's Natural History Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, University of Chicago, American Film Institute, RAND, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the University of Michigan.

Individually these are some pretty formidable names. However, by gathering each partner institution's wealth of intellectual property in a single site, fathom.com offers greater visibility on an increasingly overcrowded web. Under the umbrella of fathom.com, each partner becomes part of "the premier site for knowledge and education on the web," offering the best public content and courses of universities, libraries, and museums on a wide variety of professional, cultural, and academic subjects. And this is not your everyday portal. According to Reilly, there is strength in numbers: "the pooled resources of models such as Fathom are of a scale closer to those wielded by their media competitors."

By capturing "the almost encyclopedic breadth of knowledge and intellectual capital that people associate with these prestigious partner institutions to create outlets for distance education, travel, cultural products, and other learning opportunities," Fathom has become a poster child for knowledge marketing.

The Knowledge Marketing Inquiry: Hamel's book has launched a great debate between evolutionary and revolutionary business strategists. He writes "I don't think the problem is that companies are unwilling to cannibalize themselves. I think the problem is that they don't have enough good reasons to cannibalize themselves." What do you think? Send me your thoughts.

RobFerguson@KnowledgeMarketingGroup.com