Impact & Value Chains

Thinking about the value of digital cultural heritage is closely linked with impact, as value can be understood as economic or non-economic in nature. For CHIs to have a meaningful impact on different areas of social life, it is important to understand how the activities they conduct can affect their audiences and - speaking more broadly - the society as a whole. 

The inDICEs’ work on Policy analysis of value chains for CHIs in the Digital Single Market was aimed at fostering our understanding of current business models of interaction between CHIs and creative industries and how such models can reinforce access to culture. We started by looking into the idea of the value chain that has been introduced as an analytical tool by Michael Porter. The concept provides a very strong metaphor for understanding circulations of goods and services in the economy, however it has been criticised for providing a simplistic, linear understanding of the process of production. Cultural value creation was always a unique form of production due to the highly symbolic value of the created products. Thus, we need to acknowledge the complexity of value-creating interactions and processes related with cultural products. This becomes even more relevant with regard to digital content, considering how the digital products are produced, distributed and used. That is why we decided to look into a more sector-specific concept of the “creative value chain” that has been proposed and operationalised for the purpose of cultural statistics by UNESCO and Eurostat. The “creative value chain” is a basic analytical tool for understanding cultural production. This conceptual tool has been designed to provide means for a more in-depth analysis of the production and distribution of culture. The culture cycle consists of five stages: creation, production, dissemination, exhibition/reception/ transmission, consumption/participation.

The culture cycle (Figure 1) proposes a cyclical metaphor in order to reinforce the idea that the relationships crucial for the cultural production can be complex and occur more as a network than as a linear, structured chain (UNESCO 2009). 

Fig. 1. The Culture Cycle

The circular, rather than the linear metaphor of value creation is more suited for the purpose of analyzing the value creation in the CCS also because of the specific role that consumers play in the creation of cultural value today. This is stressed by the UNESCO model that employs a circular metaphor that stresses the fact that cultural consumption and participation leads to new cycles of creation, and that the roles of cultural creators and consumers are intertwined. The value of cultural products is also linked with the socio-cultural identity of the consumers/stakeholders and nowadays - with consumers becoming prosumers - these actors can no longer be seen as located beyond the value chain. The process of digitisation and platformisation reorganises the cultural practices and imaginations, blurring the boundaries between creators/producers and end-users. This shift in social interactions was captured by Pier Luigi Sacco in the Culture 3.0 model that is characterized by "an explosion of the pool of producers". Recently (also due to the global pandemic of COVID-19) digital circulations of cultural content have strengthened and online access to cultural goods has gained more importance.

With the shifting perception of the role and social responsibility of CHIs, the question of impact has become of crucial importance for understanding what kind of value is created by institutions in interaction with their audiences (see eg. Europeana Impact Playbook, based on the model proposed by Simon Tanner). The exploration of areas on which cultural participation and production have an indirect effect was also conducted in relation to the Culture 3.0 model and the eight tiers.

Taking all that into account, a value creation framework was proposed in the report Policy analysis of value chains for CHIs, developed on the basis of existing approaches to understanding cultural value chains and impact of cultural heritage combined with insight from specific cases of re-using digital cultural resources. The framework is based on the UNESCO cultural cycle model and intended to capture in more detail the social and economic impact of digital cultural heritage. The framework draws on the assumption expressed by the authors of the UNESCO model that value creation in the field of culture is rarely linear in the way it happens. Instead, value creation happens in networks that are complex and include varied, heterogeneous actors. What is also important to note is that these networks often span different sectors of the society, including both commercial, public and civic or grassroots entities. Activities within the process are not limited to institutionalized practices and initiatives, overseen or inspired by state institutions. The cyclical nature of the production process also means that actors can have roles at different stages of the cycle. Most importantly, users are not limited to the role of consumers and can be engaged in earlier phases, especially if the process is cyclical and assumes several cyclical rounds of reuse.

The scheme of five basic stages of what the UNESCO model defines as the cultural cycle was the basis for the proposed framework. Again, the five-stage cycle proposed by UNESCO has the aim of highlighting the complexity and variety of activities that contribute value to broadly understood cultural resources. These five stages include: Creation, Production, Dissemination, Exhibition, Consumption. However, the model is not hierarchical and should be understood rather as a network. Within this network, all kinds of connections and directions may happen when producing cultural goods. There is also an assumption that the process can be cyclical, returning to previous stages over the cultural cycle. Moreover, while conducting the case studies analysis, we observed cyclical - instead of linear - processes within the first, initial phase of project Creation identified by the UNESCO model. In this phase, we identified several steps that are significant and play a key role in the process of idea origination (as it is a process and not a one-time moment). Specific milestones have to be achieved to arrive at the moment in which one has a sufficient, broadly understood vision for a project and its societal impact. These milestones can happen - as the authors of the UNESCO model envisioned - in a cyclical fashion.

The four key types of milestones can be also perceived as key processes/activities that CHIs can keep in mind while conducting digital projects:

1. Having an initial prompt - it is more of a generic prerequisite as one starts working on a project when one has at least some initial intuition about what this project may look like.

2. Acquiring heritage expertise – it is about knowing the resource, its potential value, its importance, but also both historical and up-to-date ways of interaction with the resource(s) at hand.

3. Establishing cross-sectoral collaborations – it is about involving actors that come from different sectors pretty early in the process. We found that by achieving this milestone the interest of an end-user is safeguarded already in the vision creation process and the usage of connection and interaction mechanisms is more likely. This “safeguarding” comes from intersectoral discussions about its needs, preferences, practices, norm, challenges, etc.

4. Assuming non-access purpose – we found out that only a little above 20% of access oriented projects make use of some sort of market linkages. We believe that if non-access orientation is already injected at the vision development phase of the project it substantially increases the chances that the direct market impact will occur.

Fig. 2. Key Milestone types.

On the basis of the case studies analysis conducted, we have identified four building blocks in the chain or cycle of value creation in the field of re-use of digital cultural heritage: Vision Development, Production, Connection with Audiences, Market Linkages. These blocks can be seen as important milestones of delivering the impact with digital cultural resources. In the proposed framework, broadly understood impact emerges on the basis of two broad types of activities, conducted in the Creation stage of the cultural cycle: connecting with audiences and market linkages. What is important to stress is that impact is not just economic in character. Cultural participation can be the key driver for value creation. The eight different tiers or areas of “indirect developmental effects of culture” can be understood as specific areas or modes of such indirect effects, but also can be seen as conceptual lenses (similar to those defined in the Europeana impact framework). The proposed framework acknowledges that societal impact can occur in market-based projects (where economic incentives and economic value creation are key aspects of the value creation process) and that social and economic impact should be treated as complementary.

Fig. 3. Digital Cultural Heritage Value Creation Cycle.



What does it mean for CHIs? 

The Digital Cultural Heritage Value Creation Cycle suggests certain activities that should be taken into account and planned when working on digital projects that use digitised heritage on the subsequent stages of the process. It also shows impact vision and planning as an integral part of the workflow. This framework stresses the importance of strategic planning (with audiences and envisioned impact at the center) and can help to plan and prepare digital projects.

Resources

Collins, Harry, and Robert Evans. ‘Expertise Revisited, Part I—Interactional Expertise’. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 54 (2015): 113–23.

https://www.ne-mo.org/advocacy/our-advocacy-work/museums-during-covid-19.html

Porter, Michael E. (1985). Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance. New York.: Simon and Schuster.

UNESCO (2009), The 2009 UNESCO Framework For Cultural Statistics (FCS),
http://uis.unesco.org/sites/default/files/documents/unesco-framework-for-cultural-statistics-2009-en_0.pdf.

his cyclical model and the model proposed by ESSnet-culture (European Statistical System Network) in 2009 (where the three sequenced core functions of the creative value chain were distinguished: Creation, Production-Publishing and Dissemination-Trade) were combined by the authors of the 2017 study by KEA, --"Mapping the Creative Value Chains" (De Voldere et al. 2017).

The new model describes four core functions (Creation, Production/publishing, Dissemination/trade, Exhibition/reception/transmission).

van Dijck, J. & Nieborg, D. & Poell, T. (2019). Reframing platform power. Internet Policy Review, 8(2). https://doi.org/10.14763/2019.2.1414

Sacco, P.L. (2011), Culture 3.0: A new perspective for the EU 2014-2020 structural funds programming, EENC Paper

Tanner, S. (2012), Measuring the Impact of Digital Resources: The Balanced Value Impact Model,

King’s College London, URL: https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/measuring-the-impact-of-digital-resources(2a2a09b5-b622-4e04-a2a4-11564bd8379a).html; Tanner, S. (2020),

Delivering Impact with Digital Resources: Planning your strategy in the attention economy, London: Facet Publishing

Sacco, P.L.; Ferilli, G.; Tavano Blessi, G. From Culture 1.0 to Culture 3.0: Three Socio-Technical Regimes of Social and Economic Value Creation through Culture, and Their Impact on European Cohesion Policies.

Sustainability 2018, 10, 3923. https://doi.org/10.3390/su10113923

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