In our last post, we explored how the students in my collaborative project class at the Yale School of Music (“YSM”) identified their audiences and designed projects to meet the needs of their audience members. The next step was to test out and share prototypes of their projects with the intended audience members to see how well their projects met …
The Innovation Process in the Time of COVID: Entrepreneurial Projects at the Yale School of Music
What a year this has been! With the COVID pandemic raging, our lives pivoted online, including my graduate seminar at the Yale School of Music entitled Collaboration, Creativity and Innovation. The focus of this year’s class was how to ensure the place of classical music at a time when COVID has shut down the performing arts sector. Our learning vehicle …
Design Thinking for Music Entrepreneurs: How to Generate Creative Solutions for Audience Engagement
How do we solve the problem of attracting millennials to classical music events and building an audience for the future? My students at Mannes College of Music at the New School might have an answer! Through a class project that lasted less than a week, our students used the 5-step Design Thinking process to understand the needs of their millennial peers …
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 …
Know Your People: How Music Entrepreneurs Can Expand the Audience for Classical Music
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 …