Co-Designing Innovation Networks for Cross-Sectoral Collaboration on the Example of exploreAT!

Daily interaction with digital media and devices has become a natural habit for the majority of people across different age ranges in Western cultures. The way we interact with and react to digital media, however, has been constantly evolving and there is a clear trend towards implementing device-oriented interactive engagement in a more meaningful way, where users readily add to shaping and creating digital experiences that not only generate added value for them personally, but also for the various other actors involved. This also concerns the interaction with both virtual as well as real-life objects in cultural settings. Across different sectors, creating a complementary synthesis of the digital and analog has been a primary topic, particularly in the course of the 21st century. In this paper we aim to discuss the establishment of cultural innovation networks between museums and other sectors, exemplify potential links between digital and physical objects in connection with a current Digital Humanities project (exploreAT!) and shed light on user engagement possibilities opening towards open innovation research infrastructures (OI-RI).