Developing culture infrastructure strategy for a GCC country

Our client, a major GCC country had set a vision to improve its culture infrastructure in order to promote its local culture, stimulate the tourism sector, and develop into a regional cultural hub. To do so, it was faced with a fundamental question – what are the types of cultural infrastructure they need to invest in, and how can they activate them.

Our approach included baselining all of the existing cultural infrastructure across the country while seeking expert input from global experts on the best practices for a healthy mix of cultural infrastructure. Those include assets such as theaters, museums, opera houses and the like. Once defined the optimal mix of those, we then set out to create a business case to ensure the sustainability of those assets through an activation program. We benchmarked several global cultural hubs in order to identify the key success factors behind their success – both in terms of hard infrastructure and soft activation.

Our recommendation entailed a comprehensive list of cultural infrastructure assets to invest in, complete with a geographical distribution that fits with the innate diversity of the country's various regions and a model activation plan that spans all existing and recommended assets to ensure monetization and financial sustainability.