Corporate Museum and Organizational Memory in AgriFood Organization Sector

Abstract

The competitive environment is becoming more complex. For this reason, it is called VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous). Firms must identify new ways to maintain and increase their competitive advantage. Firms based their competitive advantage on the enhancement of knowledge and innovation. From this perspective, despite the vast literature on KM, corporate museums represent a little observed phenomenon. Corporate museums represent a new mechanism for the enhancement of knowledge and organizational memory. Despite this, studies on corporate museums focus only on the aspects of marketing and corporate branding. Few studies have addressed this phenomenon from the point of view of organizational memory and knowledge transfer. This study fits into this gap in the academic debate. From the point of view of organizational theory, the study analyzes the phenomenon of the corporate museum as a mechanism for transferring knowledge and organizational memory. This work uses a descriptive qualitative methodology. The study analyzes information from a public dataset. The analyzes focus on corporate museums in Italy, with particular attention to the agri-food sector. The results of this study highlight that the corporate museum assumes a strategic value to reduce the risk of “organizational oblivion” and increase the sharing of organizational culture. This study offers some initial observations on the phenomenon of the business museum and on the relationship with organizational memory