Abstract
The purpose of the presented study is to analyze a specific phenomenon occurring in the museum field, in order to research the managerial implications regarding the introduction of for-profit management solutions in not-for-profit organizations. The author has decided to focus her attention on the use of internationalization in a specific group of cultural institutions, that is global museums: her objective is to verify the long-term sustainability of these initiatives in terms of economic efficiency and cultural productivity and to understand whether this tendency could represent an actual evolution in museum management, providing both social and financial positive outcomes, or it should be considered only as an ad-hoc reaction to the decrease in public funding and private sponsorship, with preeminent short-term marketing goals. In order to understand the entity of the phenomenon, the author has chosen to undertake a qualitative analysis of 5 paradigmatic case histories: this method has been preferred in light of the relative novelty of the topic and on the consequent limited amount of data at disposal; to offer an analysis as comprehensive as possible, the author has selected cases with very different organizational characteristics, in order to verify the applicability of internationalization to different museum scenarios. The research has studied the internal structure of these organizations (governance, finance, collections, activities) and then focused on the nature of their internationalization strategies (financial sustainability, state of execution, level of integration with the rest of the planned activities). The research suggests that internationalization in global museums can be considered a form of innovative management and, therefore, a promising strategic option only as long as it is properly adjusted to the peculiar characteristics of the sector and that its applicability is strictly subordinated to a thorough and punctual analysis of the financial and cultural structure of the single museum by the respective governance.