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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …