SKD Dresden
Ruled out the wrong blockchain ideas before they cost a museum a budget cycle.
Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (SKD) is one of the oldest and most prestigious museum networks in the world. They wanted clarity on what blockchain could realistically do for a cultural institution.
Overview
Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (SKD) is one of the oldest and most prestigious museum networks in the world. They wanted clarity on what blockchain could realistically do for a cultural institution.
What's the challenge?
Cultural institutions get pitched blockchain ideas constantly. Most don’t survive contact with budget reality, audience expectations, or the institution’s actual mandate. SKD needed an outside team that knew the technology deeply enough to separate real use cases from marketing material, and willing to say no to the latter, on the record.
A workshop built for a museum, not for an investor pitch.
Public institutions in the art sector come with very specific requirements: procurement cycles, board approvals, public-money accountability, audience mandates. A generic blockchain workshop wouldn't have moved a single decision in that room. We built the sessions around their constraints, budget reality first, what the institution can actually approve second, the technology last. By the end they had the tools to start their own initiative, not slides about other people's projects.
What We Did
An institutional client evaluating a technology surrounded by hype. We spent most of the engagement ruling out use cases that wouldn’t survive a single budget cycle, rather than building an optionality roadmap that would have been hard to execute. Multiple workshops, Web3 education for their teams, a technical deep-dive, a strategy workshop, plus consulting sessions spread across 2023 and 2024. Business case evaluation grounded in cultural-institution realities. Smaller scope than the original ask, and clarity on the one or two use cases worth piloting.
Outcomes
What We Learned
The most valuable thing you can give a client outside the tech industry is the confidence to say no to the wrong ideas. Most of our workshop time wasn’t spent teaching blockchain. It was spent ruling out use cases that wouldn’t survive their first year. Strategy is mostly subtraction.
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