TAG: innovation

Bang on a Can: Inspiring Innovation for Today’s Music Entrepreneurs

Last week, I had the privilege of participating on a panel examining the music powerhouse, Bang on a Can,  as a case study in successful arts entrepreneurship. The panel, a Career Development session for composers and other musicians, was sponsored by the American Composers Orchestra as part  of the Underwood New Music Readings, a program that discovers today’s brightest orchestral composers and …

Ideas into Action: How Music Entrepreneurs Create and Innovate

One of my favorite aspects of teaching my Innovation and Collaboration class at Yale is the project whereby the students take on a critical problem in the classical music field and work in collaborative groups to create and implement new solutions to these problems.  It was fascinating to see how we were able to take the spark of an idea …

Creativity for Music Entrepreneurs Part V: Design Thinking in 3 Steps

Design Thinking is all the rage these days in academic circles, often misused and overhyped as the perfect teaching tool. In fact, Design Thinking is an excellent process for advancing creativity and innovation when properly understood and applied. Design thinking is the human-centered design process that helps you understand the emotional needs of the people whose problems you are solving through …

Creativity for Music Entrepreneurs Part IV: 4 Steps to Develop and Improve Your Idea

What happens when you have come up with lots of big, juicy ideas for your innovative solution? Is that enough to create a workable solution to your problem? Not so fast! When we last left the music entrepreneurs in my Innovation and Collaboration class at the Yale School of Music, they had gone through the stage of the creativity problem …

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 II: 3 Steps to Clarify Your Problem

My class on Innovation and Collaboration at the Yale School of Music is designed to teach music entrepreneurs how to innovate by solving a problem near and dear to their hearts in the world of classical music. My students are creative individuals who are eager to do something meaningful with their music.   They also want to come up with solutions that have …

Know Your People: How Music Entrepreneurs Can Expand the Audience for Classical Music

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Audience engagement is all the rage these days as the classical music field grapples with how to stay relevant in today’s culture. Many of us are asking the question of what do today’s audiences REALLY want. In my class at Yale last semester, we took up this question as part of our collaborative projects. The charge to my students was …

Creative Problem Solving for Music Entrepreneurs: The Two Mindsets of Creativity

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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 …