Engaging with the environment: the role of mobile apps.

During the last decades, the development of museums throughout the Western World has significantly increased. However, this so-called museum boom has not translated into an increase in visitor rates; in contrast, a decline in visitor attendance has been recorded. In parallel, shifts in the leisure industry have resulted in museums competing with not only other museums but also with other leisure attractions –and what’s more, museums receive limited funding due to the stricter extension of public money in the last years. Therefore, museums, operating within a tumultuous and quickly changing environment that has also dramatically been influenced by the rise of the Web 2.0, need to reposition themselves and find innovative ways to attract the today’s sophisticated and demanding audiences. The diffusion of Web 2.0 and lastly the upsurge of mobile technologies have provided museums with a potential to attract these diverse audiences and to provide new value propositions that correspond to the needs of contemporary users. In fact, over the last few years the use of mobile devices has been an already established trend, and this momentum generates an additional opportunity for museums to exploit the capabilities of mobile technologies and to achieve their goals. This paper attempts to investigate the capabilities that mobile applications offer to museums to attract the contemporary audiences by providing new value propositions. In order to do so, eleven mobile applications were selected to be analyzed based on geographic criteria as well as their size and the cultural context where they operate. The data collection and analysis of the cases was guided from the conceptual framework that was formulated according to the literature on the field. The significant findings confirmed most of the theory and permitted a judgement on what extent museums exploit the capabilities of mobile apps to provide public value to their audiences.