What kind of creative thinker are you? If that strikes you as an odd question, it stems from my belief that we all have the capacity to creative! In fact, “creativity for all” is the underlying the message of my TEDx talk, Cracking the Code on Creativity: The Secret to Full-Blast Living. Moreover, there are many different ways to be a …
Innovation and Feedback: An Essential Step for Entrepreneurial Projects
Why is feedback essential to innovation? Let’s examine how students in my Innovation and Collaboration class at the Yale School of Music are learning this lesson through their semester projects. When we last left the music entrepreneurs , the class had explored the needs of today’s audiences and zeroed in on the problem of how to make classical music more relevant …
Ideation and Incubation: How Music Entrepreneurs Expand and Improve Their Creative Ideas
When we last left the students in my Innovation and Collaboration class at the Yale School of Music, they identified the key problems of their audiences. The next order of business was to come up with some creative ideas for solving these problems. We entered the phase of creative problem solving known as “ideation” where students have brainstormed using a variety of …
Creative Problem Solving for Music Entrepreneurs: Defining the Problems of Classical Music
My class at Yale on Creating Value Through Innovative Projects is off to a great start! The focus of my seminar is how musicians can generate innovative solutions to the most pressing problems facing classical music today and to work in collaborative groups to solve these problems. My goal is to make my students better thinkers so that they can lead …
Creativity for Music Entrepreneurs Part III: Have Fun with Ideation
Now comes the fun part: ideation! This is the stage of the creativity problem solving process where you generate a lot of wild, crazy ideas in order to come up with an innovative solution to the problem you are solving. When we last left our music entrepreneurs in my Innovation and Collaboration Class at the Yale School of Music, the …
Creativity For Music Entrepreneurs Part I: 5 Steps to Find Your Cause in the World of Classical Music
This semester, 16 students in my class on Innovation and Collaboration class at the Yale School of Music are tackling the issue of the sustainability of classical music in the 21st Century in order to get closer to the Ideal World of Classical Music. These students are not just superb musicians but they also aspire to be cultural leaders who want …
Creative Problem Solving for Music Entrepreneurs: The Two Mindsets of Creativity
How can a group of 20-something professional musician graduate students generate breakthrough solutions to the problems facing classical music today in order to insure the health and the vitality of the field? This was the focus of my new class last semester at the Yale School of Music entitled Collaboration, Entrepreneurship and Innovation. My goal was to teach creative problem …
Innovation in the Arts: What the Olympics and Happy Hour Can Teach Us About Audience Development
How could the Olympics and Happy Hour possibly help lead to a solution on how to attract more audiences to classical music? This was the topic of a fascinating workshop that I led last weekend at the Juilliard School Leadership Retreat on The 21st Century Artist as Entrepreneur and Innovator. My goal? To tap into the creativity of today’s bright young …
Conflict Management for Emotionally Intelligent Musicians: How to Run a Conflict Meeting
In my last post on how to prepare for a conflict meeting, we took a look at how the members of a string quartet could prepare for a brewing ensemble conflict stemming from a perception that one of the members of the quartet was not fully committed to the ensemble and was engaging in behaviors that undermined the rehearsal process, threatened …