Productive frictions: digital innovation at the intersection of creative economy and museum practice

Museums are increasingly expected to contribute to Creative Economy agendas that frame digital innovation as a source of competitive advantage, audience growth, and increased economic value. Yet when these policy expectations enter museums, they create tensions with mandates grounded in preservation, contextual interpretation, and long-term knowledge production. The article explores these tensions through the concept of friction, understood not as failure or resistance, but as an encounter between distinct institutional logics, temporalities, and value systems. Drawing on twenty-seven semi-structured interviews, primarily from Estonia and supplemented by museum-sector perspectives from Finland and Latvia, as well as a reflexive case study, the article identifies four interrelated forms of friction: temporal, organisational, mediatisation, and translational. Temporal frictions arise from different scales, tempo and planning horizons of museum and technology partners during the implementation of digital projects. Organisational frictions expose misalignments in institutional logics and the roles and labour required for digital innovation. Mediatisation frictions concern how media and platform logics shape the presentation and interpretation of cultural content. Translational frictions emerge when seemingly shared concepts carry different meanings across professional and institutional contexts. Translational frictions become visible in the conceptual ambiguity of terms and words that are seemingly shared but mean different things to different partners in the innovation process. They point to the opportunity to reflect on how cultural content could be mediated in different contexts. Friction reveals the uneven distribution of decision-making authority, labour, and responsibility among collaborators. Technical partners and funding frameworks can exert greater influence over development priorities, while museums undertake often-invisible coordination and translation work and retain long-term responsibility for digital outputs and their cultural content. These asymmetries shape whose priorities prevail and whether friction creates opportunities to reconsider established practices. These frictions shape how cross-sector collaborations negotiate and implement digital innovation. Rather than considering these frictions merely as implementation challenges, this analysis argues that they reveal the work necessary to align innovation policy with museum practice. Friction becomes productive when collaboration enables participants to address institutional differences and negotiate the distribution of authority, labour, and responsibility. Therefore, effective digital innovation in museums requires arrangements that acknowledge institutional differences, grant museums meaningful influence over development decisions, acknowledge their coordination and translation work, and align project commitments with their long-term responsibilities.