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 …
Entrepreneurial Projects at the Yale School of Music: What Today’s Audiences Need from Classical Music:
Each fall, I teach a wonderful class at the Yale School of Music (“YSM”) entitled, Collaborative Leadership To Advance Creativity, Innovation and New Opportunities in the Arts. My class uses the experiential semester-long collaborative project to teach graduate music students how to create innovative solutions to problems in the classical music field. Our focus is on meeting the needs of …
What Kind of Creative Thinker Are You?
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 …
Design Thinking for Music Entrepreneurs: Using Empathy to Connect with Audiences
This semester, I am teaching The Entrepreneurial Musician at the New School, Mannes College of Music, a required entrepreneurship course that helps master of music candidates to explore how to create meaningful and sustainable careers in the arts. Last week, we learned about design thinking, a 5-step human-centered design process whose aim is to design products and services that fulfill …
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 …