Social innovation and accessibility in museum: some evidence from the SoStare al MANN project

In recent years, the function of museums has changed from focusing on protecting cultural heritage to reach out to a wider audience and proposing a series of new methods to promote and display its collections and contribute towards collective cultural and social development. In this new vision, accessibility acquires a central role, asking to enable people who otherwise would have been excluded, be it because of physical disabilities or because suffering from behavioural and/or cognitive disorders, to enjoy the benefits of culture. Accordingly, some museums have developed a number of new approaches for people with special needs affected by autism spectrum disorder. At the same time these new activities are designed leveraging new competences and knowledge that museums only rarely own, but they can get access to them engaging local stakeholders in a process that starts from analysing the local area' needs to develop new ways to visit the collections that can be seen as a social innovation. This work is concerned with analysing a project undertaken by the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli (National Archaeological Museum of Naples) with some of its stakeholders, aiming to understand whether, by altering the perspective of analysis, museums can introduce totally novel ways to approach their collections, so that they are more inclusive and welcoming for people affected by behavioural and/or cognitive disorders.