Abstract
Firms trying to survive to changes in their institutional and resource system can resort to the building of inter-organizational networks to guarantee themselves survival and growth. At the same time, the environmental change determines a transformation in the requests and expectations coming from institutional actors. In the case of public museums, financial crises and social changes have concurred to force these organizations to rethink both their institutional logics and their organizational structures and practices. In Italy, the creation of formally structured networks of public museums, coordinated by a new organizational entity (the stakeholders foundation), has represented a response to external pressures and internal inefficiencies but, at the same time, as the paper proposes, it has promoted the key strategic leader of the network as the institutional entrepreneur and management innovator.