YOMU at Game of Brain: stress-testing the future of digital mediation

YOMU at Game of Brain: when the ecosystem challenges our vision

This year, YOMU – Your Online Museum was among the 10 finalist projects selected for Game of Brain, an innovation challenge bringing together founders and students from diverse backgrounds.

For YOMU, it was the perfect opportunity to step outside our bubble and confront our digital mediation solution with fresh perspectives: students, experts, jury members and key players from the cultural and innovation ecosystem.

Why join a challenge like Game of Brain?

From a museum’s point of view, the core question is simple: a solution like YOMU only has value if it addresses real needs on the ground. Joining Game of Brain allowed us to:

• Clarify our value proposition for cultural institutions.
• Test our assumptions with young profiles, close to the audiences museums want to (re)engage.
• Identify blind spots: what seems obvious to us is not always obvious to visitors.

Over 12 hours, student teams worked on YOMU, challenged our model, suggested new use cases and questioned our impact for museums.

A key feedback from the jury: “The idea is good, but a prototype needs to be tested”

One sentence from the jury particularly stood out:

“The idea is good, but a prototype needs to be tested.”

We fully agree. A digital mediation solution cannot remain a concept. It has to be tested, measured and refined with real visitors, in real museums.

This is exactly what we have started to do:

• The YOMU app is already available on the stores and used by 300+ early visitors.
• We are working with pilot institutions to deploy and test the solution onsite.
• We are collecting usage data to continuously improve the experience for both visitors and museum teams.

This feedback reinforces our conviction: YOMU’s strength lies not only in the idea itself, but in its ability to evolve through real-life experimentation.

“Well thought out, but museum attendance is declining”

Another written feedback also resonated with us:

“Well thought out, but museum attendance is declining.”

This observation, shared by many institutions, is actually at the heart of YOMU’s mission. The decline in attendance – especially among certain audiences (young adults, occasional visitors, families) – raises a simple question:

How can we give people new reasons to walk into a museum?

This is where YOMU comes in, with three main levers:

• Personalised mediation, adapted to each visitor’s level and interests.
• Playful quizzes and game mechanics to make visits more active and memorable.
• Daily cultural discovery (one artwork, movement, technique or artist per day) to keep a regular connection with art, even outside the museum.

For us, declining attendance is not a fatality. It is a warning signal that calls for rethinking mediation and the tools offered to audiences.

What YOMU brings to museums in concrete terms

Through Game of Brain, we were able to better articulate YOMU’s added value for cultural institutions:

• Democratising access to art with a free app for visitors, offering clear, inclusive, multilingual content.
• Attracting and retaining new audiences with a mobile experience aligned with 15–35 year-old habits (short content, quizzes, progression, notifications).
• Giving more visibility to exhibitions before and after the visit through daily discovery of artworks and themes.
• Providing actionable data to understand visitor journeys, consulted artworks, time spent, quizzes played, and more.

A milestone in YOMU’s trajectory

Beyond the challenge itself, Game of Brain has been a structuring moment for YOMU:

• A confirmation that personalised digital mediation is a topic of strong interest across the ecosystem.
• Valuable external perspectives on our positioning and value proposition.
• New ideas to co-design mediation tools with museums and their audiences.

Thanks and next steps

We would like to warmly thank the organisers, the jury and all the students who took the time to discover, challenge and enrich YOMU during Game of Brain.

What’s next? Continuing to work hand in hand with museums, foundations and cultural institutions that want to:

• experiment with new forms of digital mediation;
• attract younger and more diverse audiences;
• better measure the impact of their exhibitions.

If you would like to learn more or co-build a pilot project with YOMU, our team will be happy to talk.