Triennale Milano will be an engaging meeting place, where exchange becomes discovery, opportunity and enrichment. A place to grow and challenge the future, enabling knowledge to regain its ascendancy and become the one true defender of our existence.

By listening to the public and researching their needs, Triennale Milano can continue to be modern and contemporary and improve relations given that listening and remaining attentive help cultivate a sense of belonging and the sharing of social responsibility. Research projects developed by Triennale Milano will involve the public directly in order to stimulate a reflection on the future that involves the communities where the cultural institutions operate. Adopting the values of co-creation, with insiders but not only, makes the public into actors, not “just spectators”. In this context, it seems crucial to open up to the region to encourage the diversification and enrichment of values.

The user experience of Triennale Milano’s cultural offerings must adapt more and more to users’ emerging needs. It will be key to acquire high visitor tracking, profiling and segmenting capability as part of our production, marketing and communication strategies, making it possible to deliver our offer in more consciously determined formats, times and logics. In this process, we will equip ourselves with useful allies: the technological projects underway to implement a modern, evolved CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system that aims to become unique in the sector, and new membership programs to be unveiled in the first four months of 2023.

The development of new audience engagement activities, supported by constant research, are the very DNA of Triennale Milano, central elements in the strategy of innovating relations and cultural offerings. We want to develop the offer in view of audiences oriented towards use by system, not by sector, and that also passes through new channels of relationship, in particular, digital channels. It should appear and develop not only through the use of tools and languages typical of the world of teens, but more importantly through the “discovery” of new possibilities of cultural entertainment, capable of arousing positive emotions through the experience of a stimulating, new context perceived as compatible and inviting.

Ongoing engagement and value construction with new audiences is tied to the possibility of increasing their level of loyalty. To encourage retention, we want to generate a greater sense of belonging, which is closely connected to how Triennale spaces are managed, so that audiences are inspired to stay longer and experience it as ‘their own”. To that end, it is crucial to strengthen the dialogue with the public off-site and to increase the level of Triennale activity outside the Palazzo, establishing its presence in the area beyond the perimeter of the center. We need to involve both nearby and outlying neighborhoods, with their residents, in specific projects of distributed, participatory culture.

Through a system of educational activities aimed at responding to new needs and to intercepting new segments of the public, Triennale Milano ensures a multidisciplinary offer of arts, including performance, and projects, which can provide tools to interpret the complexity of the contemporary world.We want to consolidate and enlarge our audience base, diversifying the offer with a careful, critical approach and adopting open, stimulating, informal ways to enjoy culture. These activities will be accompanied by networking with international cultural institutions and initiating educational processes with a positive social impact on the region.

We will differentiate the Triennale spaces on the basis of the needs of both loyal and occasional audiences, as well as of internal staff. In so doing, we will pay particular attention to accessibility, supported by the necessary technological evolution as a development tool. The spaces will fulfill different functions based on visitor needs for services, exhibitions, events, study, research, work and distribution, guaranteeing flexibility of space and use. Spaces to pause, both physically and mentally, will be identified in the Palazzo so that Triennale users can enjoy a less formal atmosphere of spontaneous experience and much-needed relaxation.

Managing the complexity and multidisciplinarity of the Triennale Milano brand is a challenge we seek to transform into an opportunity. To begin, we must leverage our distinct programming as a tool capable of creating a brand story, along with research and heritage enhancement activities. Innovation in the development of new formats and products must be consistent with the brand’s image and reputation. Proposing new formats for experience and exhibition will in fact be key to Triennale Milano’s strategic positioning, as will the use of new channels (publishing, e-commerce, etc.) and the consolidation of existing ones.

We will arrange the spaces with an even more flexible configuration to allow the public to enjoy Triennale Milano in ever new and dynamic ways, ensuring greater versatility of the cultural offer and diversification of the opening hours. Both internal and external spaces dedicated to events will be equipped with appropriate technologies, solutions and arrangements to accommodate multidisciplinary, impromptu programming. Architectural improvements will be made to the Palazzo to refurbish several abandoned spaces and to make the building more energy-efficient. Both these interventions willhelp to achieve virtuous standards of sustainability and comfort.

The acquisition and consolidation of skills, constant listening to our stakeholders, respect and quality of the relations with them on all levels are the ingredients required to foster an evolution in the positioning, value and reputation of the Triennale Milano brand. We will sponsor conferences, study days, symposiums, publications and national and international encounters that serve to strengthen the brand image and, at the same time, to suggest responses to the questions of our time.

Internationalization concerns the brand and the institution in general, and it is in this direction that we want to expand and consolidate existing relations. Governance and those who are part of it will play a decisive role, along with our host city, which over the years has become a creative hub and center of culture. Milan, in fact, offers a wide variety of opportunities for consumption and cultural enjoyment with an international scope. A starting point will be projects already enjoying such scope in their productions, such as the International Exposition and the relationship with the Bureau International des Expositions.

We need to engage with interlocutors and market dynamics which find performance indicators to be a useful way to tell the story of our activities. We want to develop a set of tools that makes it possible to describe our cultural activities in all their complexity and detail, for external communication and for the reconsideration of internal objectives. The metrics system should express the results of activities and services and the strategic aspect of the institution’s impact.

The present and the arts can and must have a mutually inspiring relationship in which the major issues of contemporary life influence artistic production, which, in turn, generates reflections and projects of benefit to society. On the strength of its unique position as a multidisciplinary art institution within the national scene, Triennale Milano intends to develop a research, service, experimentation and cultural production platform that works in synergy with Italian and foreign entities well-established in academic, artistic/creative, and scientific arenas but also with emerging, innovative entities. The Study Center will create the conditions for subsequent productions, also contributing to the definition and study of the themes of the International Expositions, to delineate a line of thought that evolves from the present while always facing the future, for the good of the public and of society.

We will form collaborations in the areas of research, training and education to establish new sector guidelines and propose new perspectives on the future. In this way we can supplement the offer targeted for students, researchers and insiders and integrate it with new services, such as restoration laboratories, workshops, study and doctoral grants, in collaboration with universities, while also enabling access to new forms of financing.

We want to position ourselves as a trailblazer capable of absorbing the risks of investing in research and innovation projects, demonstrating best practices, guidelines and new modes of use in the cultural sector. Heritage, cultural production, communication, publishing, organization and strategic planning are the main areas in which we will contribute to the evolution of the sector, introducing services for museums and other cultural institutions. The Innovation Hub will be involved in a wide range of areas, including reports on trends and forecasts, the evolution of visitor experience and capacity-enhancing technological systems, training and coaching, organizational redesign and research on new professions, and integration of methodologies for innovation based on co-design.

We want to provide a single, unified vision of the Triennale cultural heritage and its historic memory, connecting archives, collections and artworks in the Palazzo. This corpus represents a key enabler to streamlining the process of locating materials and information, in order to construct new ways of use and to create multidisciplinary stories. We want to revitalize our heritage through new technological supports and to identify new methodologies and procedures to archive and share it. Both of these actions will allow us to make that heritage better known and appreciated, both internally and externally, and to accommodate and surprise different audiences.

“Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.” — Conway’s law

Evolution in the ways of relating to Triennale Milano’s audiences requires a flexible, well-distributed organization oriented towards listening. We want to forge a new way to value and empower the people who work in Triennale, with their experience, skills and ability to contribute to the evolution of our strategic positioning. To improve our ability to gather insights from those working daily in the organization with visitors, partners, donors and stakeholders of the Italian and international cultural ecosystem, we want to introduce co-design methodologies and tools along with enterprise collaboration technologies and to activate structured pathways for the adoption of those novelties by employees.

To build our internal configuration, we will turn more and more to models such as Agile, Sociocracy and RenDanHeYi, which call for transverse organizational artifacts, manifested in the form of collaborative agreements, processes and practices that distribute responsibility and value creation while supporting internal transparency. The introduction of practices linked to Agile for complex, multidisciplinary project management will ensure a high degree of reaction and pro-action to the constantly changing external environment. In the short term, we will introduce cross-departmental (circle) work teams who will operate with considerable autonomy and responsibility on the basis of prioritybacklogs created by the mediation of three factors: strategic direction, public needs and productive capacity.

Just as the activation of “agile” work teams can bring operational benefits, so too the definition of planning and governance structures at the highest level of the organization can be useful. Circles to which new projects can be entrusted will be activated through proposal, evaluation and approval processes. The iterative nature of the practices chosen reduces the risk of incremental innovation. In the long term, the evolution of the organizational model will move along these lines to best accommodate the distribution of autonomy and responsibility.

Training is a crucial tool to foster the adoption of new forms, models and tools for work. From a blended perspective, training aims to juxtapose moments of planned learning with moments of independent study, supported by suitable technological tools. Multidisciplinarity, co-planning and distributed responsibility are issues related to the evolution of company culture which cannot be solved simply by the transfer of soft and hard skills.

Training will be accompanied by ongoing analysis of employee needs, designing an employee experience that interprets and satisfies those needs, new ways of incentivizing, for example, by setting goals that stimulate interdisciplinary collaboration, the introduction of new professional figures and roles and initiatives devoted to change management.

Work environments will be remodeled for comfort and ease of working. In addition to being providing with appropriate equipment and technologies, the offices and all personnel spaces will become more flexible so diverse collective and individual activities can be carried out, encouraging collaboration but guaranteeing privacy where necessary. Furthermore, this flexibility will allow the various environments to coexist smoothly and make it possible to host external partners, new collaborators and researchers. We will identify spaces for food and drink and for relaxation so personnel can spend the various moments of their working day in appropriate settings.