Leaning Into Value: Becoming a User-Focused Museum

Leaning into Value: Becoming a User-Focused Museum provides guidance to museum leaders struggling to navigate today's often tumultuous, ever-changing economic, political, leisure and educational landscape. Provided is a concrete framework for maximizing institutional success, a continuous Value Realization process that enables museum leaders to effectively: 1) Calibrate the needs and interests of their current and potential users; 2) Articulate how and why they create value so they can foster enduring relationships with users; 3) Create an ever-evolving series of products and services that consistently deliver unique value to an ever-more diverse set of constituencies; and finally, 4) Validate their activities through empirical processes that promote evidence-based decision making and catalyze measurable, year-on-year improvements in their organization's community value.

John Falk has a nearly unparalleled level of name recognition amongst museum professionals worldwide and enjoys a reputation as a leading researcher and thinker about museums. In acknowledgment of his accomplishments, he has received a number of prestigious awards, including the 2023 Bloop 50 Award celebrating the work of the fifty key individuals internationally whose creativity, passion, and drive has helped shape and improve museums, the Western Museums Association's (2022) Leadership Award for Significant and Lasting Impact, the Distinguished Career Award (2016) from NARST: A worldwide organization for improving science teaching and learning through research; the Oregon State University, University Outreach and Engagement Vice Provost Award for Excellence, Innovation-Partnerships Award (2016); the Council of Scientific Society Presidents Award for Educational Research (2013) and the American Alliance of Museums John Cotton Dana Award for Leadership (2010). In 2006 the American Alliance of Museums included Falk on their list of the 100 most influential museum professionals of the past 100 years.

Over his career, Falk has held a number of senior positions, including at the Smithsonian Institution, Oregon State University, where he is now the Sea Grant Professor Emeritus of Free-Choice Learning, and the Institute for Learning Innovation (ILI), an internationally recognized museum-serving non-profit, which he founded and directed for decades.

John Falk is consistently ranked as one of the top social scientists in the world. He has written more than two hundred and fifty scholarly articles and chapters and more than a dozen books in the fields of museum studies, psychology, business, leisure and tourism, biology and education. His ability to synthesize complex ideas and research drawn from multiple disciplines into engaging storylines is a hallmark of his work. He has thoroughly researched and developed the ideas to be presented in Leaning into Value and directly builds on three of his earlier published books The Value of Museums: Enhancing Societal Well-Being (2021), his more theoretical, scholarly book on the same topic: Born to Choose: Evolution, Self & Well-Being (2019), and his museum-focused business book Thriving in the Knowledge Age (with Beverly Sheppard, 2006).