The Founding Collection
Every institution has to start somewhere.
Every institution has to start somewhere.
The Museum of Organisational Culture is the world's first institution dedicated to organisational culture: the artefacts, rituals, and inherited practices of working life.
Not the culture organisations claim to have. The culture they actually produce. The object that was just there until one day it wasn't. The ritual nobody started deliberately but everyone continued. The thing that made one organisation genuinely different from every other – and disappeared when the people who carried it moved on.
No institution in the world collects this. MoOC exists to change that.
The first twelve organisations will be Swedish.
The museum is starting in Sweden. It is not a Swedish museum. We are building MOC as a global institution, with a collection that reflects that. But every collection needs a first room. Ours is here.
Each organisation in the founding collection donates one artefact to the permanent collection and is named in the museum's founding record. This is not a sponsorship that expires. It is an act of institutional patronage for something that has never existed before.
Each organisation works from a brief designed to help find the right object. You don't need to know what it is yet. That is what the brief is for.
Why be in the founding collection?
Your name will be in the permanent record. Not on a wall that gets repainted, or a report that gets filed. In a collection that exists specifically to hold the culture your organisation fostered.
You will be first. The founding collection closes at twelve. After that, the collection opens globally. There is no second chance to be in the first room.
It tells the truth about your culture in a way nothing else does. Not the version that lives in a values statement. The one that lives in an object. Something people — inside your organisation and beyond — will recognise immediately.
It doesn't have to be dramatic. It doesn't have to be flattering. It just has to be real.
Think you have something worth keeping? If you lead an organisation (or work in one) I want to talk.
Urban Deli
Urban Deli is a Stockholm institution: part restaurant, part food hall, part deli, part hotel – with three locations across the city and close to 200 people working across them. It has never been just one thing, and it has never tried to be.
MOC identified Urban Deli as the first organisation in the founding collection. They have donated a cultural artefact that tells a specific, political, very Stockholm story. It was created to stand up for employees and mark a clear stance against intolerance. Along the way it became something more – a symbol, a culture carrier, a statement about who Urban Deli is.
Swish
Swish is Swedish infrastructure. Not a product. Not an app. Infrastructure. Close to nine million people use it. It quietly changed how a country handles money, trust, and the small daily acts that hold communities together.
They have donated a cultural artefact that tells the origin story of an idea – a specific moment, in a specific room, when something that didn't exist yet was brought into being.
EY Doberman
For 25 years, EY Doberman has built digital experiences for some of the world's most recognisable brands. They know how organisations communicate, how they present themselves, how they want to be seen.
So when we asked them to find an object that told a true story about how they work, we were curious what a design agency would keep.
It is not what you would expect. We can't tell you what it is yet. We can tell you it made us think differently about what design culture actually looks like from the inside.
Klättermusen
Klättermusen was born in 1975, the product of a counterculture. A spirit of non-conformism that didn't start in a boardroom but in a Verkstad – a workshop – and has never really left.
They have donated a cultural artefact that tells a specific, precise story about what it has meant to build something with that spirit over fifty years.
Hyper Island
Hyper Island was founded in 1996, in a decommissioned naval base in Karlskrona. Not a campus. Not a classroom. A submarine pen. The choice of building was not accidental. It was a statement about what learning should feel like: unfamiliar, serious, built for something that matters.
The artefact they are donating is not an object of nostalgia, but a reflection of lived values. A reminder of where it all started, and an invitation to keep evolving what culture can become.
