What makes innovation work? Innovation practice in the National Library of the Netherlands

Abstract

The National Library of the Netherlands, (Koninklijke Bibliotheek, hereafter KB), has been innovating its services and organization for the past 20 years and expects to continue to do so in the future. The central question in this article is: what makes innovation work in the organization of the KB? We will focus on two use cases: the development of the recently opened Delpher portal, giving access to 30 million pages of digitized Dutch heritage, and the current development of the KB ResearchLab that gives internal and external researchers a platform for experiments. A review of innovation theory and practice (Balk 2013) provides us with a checklist of factors that determine the innovation capacity of a library, grouped in four themes: Leadership and culture, Knowledge and organizational learning, Collaboration capacity and Organizational design. By applying this innovation checklist to the use cases discussed, we hope to contribute to the body of best practice in innovation in national libraries. Finally, we will look ahead at the development of the National Digital Library of the Netherlands, integrating services for the public library community into the KB in the near future and share some potential scenarios for the future of the library landscape in the Netherlands with the audience.