TAG: design thinking

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 …

Today’s Audience For Classical Music: How to Make Classical Music Relevant and Accessible

Every fall, I have the privilege of teaching a project-based seminar to a group of budding music entrepreneurs at the Yale School of Music. The class, Creating Value Through Innovative Collaborative Projects (Music 621a), addresses the problem of how to keep classical music alive and vital in our culture.  My goal is to equip my students with leadership and innovation …

Innovation for Music Entrepreneurs: Get Creative with Implementation

One of the hallmarks of my class at the Yale School of Music, Creating Value Through Innovative Projects, is that students learn by taking action.  My seminar’s focus is how to generate innovative solutions to the most pressing problems in classical music today. Over the course of the past semester, my students worked collaboratively on four different creative projects. Three …

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 …

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 …

Using Creativity in Your Career: 5 Steps to Recharge Your Career Satisfaction

Welcome to the new year!  How is your career going? That’s a big question and one that I love to help people sort out since a lot of your time is devoted to your career and life is a lot more satisfying when you feel good about what you do.  What helps is to apply creativity in your career. Let’s …

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 …