These museums are actually a revival of institutions common in the 18th and 19th centuries, when museums were, as the article says, more cabinets of curiosities than silos of specialization.

"The [Royal Ontario Museum], the Australian Museum and a few other institutions like them are an updating of the earliest type of museum. Instead of being shown as curiosities, objects are treated as signifiers of how life is led. 'We're a hybrid,' said Mary Sue Sweeney Price, director of the Newark Museum in New Jersey. 'Our curators mount cross-cultural exhibitions informed by science and art in order to generate new understanding of science and art.'"

By presenting this synthesis of art and other objects, these interdisciplinary museums are using objects to tell stories about how people go about their lives, one curator explained.

"At the ROM, objects taken from its separate collections (fine and decorative arts, history, textiles, archaeology, geology, mineralogy, paleontology and zoology) are often mixed and matched in highly interdisciplinary displays to create a narrative not often seen in the more specialized museums that we are used to."

These museums and their exhibits are as much anthropology as art and history, and that redefinition of the museum’s mission (and the curator's role) is what interests me. By presenting examples of art in combination with other objects, items, technologies and whatnot from the same time period, these exhibits can provide an immersive experience that itself leads to a particular type of story. Put another way: by combining elements in a hybrid manner, the ROM and like-minded museums give visitors a view to an expanded appreciation for the inner and outer lives of the people in those bygone days.

Not to be missed is the emphasis on the juxtaposition of the same type of object from different places, say, African and European dresses from coeval periods. Sometimes, we can attain a much richer understanding of a product or tool or even a cultural activity if we look at the different ways various cultures approach them. I'd even say some of our most valuable innovation is sparked when we see familiar things in unfamiliar settings, and we realize we can borrow, reshape and redeploy ideas to fit a new setting or marketplace.

For businesses in search of growth, these curators and their museums are providing news we can use. They demonstrate that a multi-dimensional, immersive examination of a market and customer universe – a hybrid examination – can lead to new and different insights.

"At the ROM, the point isn't so much the individual objects as creating a big-picture view of life at a certain time and place. 'We encourage visitors to make connections in their own minds,' Ms. Carding said."

These hybrid-thinking styles of understanding are different than the analytic, problem-solving approach still dominant in modern business culture. It's a little like the difference between reading an encyclopedia entry about, say, Russia in the late 19th century, and reading "Anna Karenina." The encyclopedia may indeed provide valuable data about the population as a whole; the novel helps you understand more deeply what it actually felt like to live in that time. Likewise, organizations seeking to develop growth and new kinds of businesses need to understand their customers in a multidimensional way, one that’s arguably more like the immersive experience of a novel, and less like the analysis of an encyclopedia -- less like the history lesson of a single-themed museum, and more like the Royal Ontario Museum.