Welcome to Innovation in Arts and Culture. I'm Dave Owens, I'm the professor of the Practice and Management Innovation here at the Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Hey, Jim. >> Hey, Dave. And I'm Jim Rosenberg, I'm a senior adviser here at National Arts Strategies, also an independent consultant, I work with mission-driven organizations here in the cultural sector, as well as in other sectors. Dave and I have had the chance to work together now for several years, presenting an in person version of this innovation seminar to cultural organizations all around the US. We've worked with board members, with executives, with staff in most types of cultural institutions, from libraries and zoos to science centers, fine art museums, dance groups, the whole range of the field. We've had a chance to work with teams on some pretty sticky problems that they've been using these new ideas to try and get unstuck. But one of the things Dave and I found ourselves talking about was how could we bring these ideas to a lot more people in the field? Not just here in the US, where we could easily travel but all around the world and not just nonprofit institutions but everyone involved. Whether you're an artist or a freelancer, you're a volunteer, you're a student, you're a community activist who uses the arts, we wanted to find a way to bring these ideas and make them available. When Dave took his graduate business school class on innovation and made that into an online class, we saw the opportunity to take that content and craft an experience specifically for the arts and cultural community. >> I teach another online class that I developed as a guide for innovation for all types of organizations. The class was built off my years of working with and teaching in organizations and here at the university. I really have been driven, I think the best thing to say, is I've been driven by the question of why is it so hard to bring good ideas to the light of day or to think about this differently, is why do so many good ideas get stopped? It's almost as if we really didn't want them to succeed, if we really didn't want them to get out. I teach about this in business school, I work with nonprofit and for profit organizations on this question. I'm very, very interested in this question. Recently, I wrote a book called Creative People Must Be Stopped and that book it pulls together my thinking about the issues that allows innovation to happen, what helps it happen, and actually, what stops it from happening. I've captured these ideas in the videos on my online class and those are the videos we're going to use in the class together. Think of the videos as a textbook, as the place where the key ideas are introduced and the lecture part of everything. Like a text-book, the examples are going to come from lots of sectors and industries and so the videos themselves are not arts and culture specific. >> We've taken our experience teaching about innovation in the creative field to build on this video material. We've added some prompts and some questions in the videos themselves to give you a chance to reflect and think about how does this apply to my work. How does this apply in the cultural field? We have added to the readings and we've made some changes to the weekly assignments to really focus in on arts and culture. We've also planned the weekly discussion topics that will be the focus of the online discussion forum to be all about arts and culture, as well. We've taken this rich video material and we've really wrapped it in prompts that help you consider how the material is used in the arts and culture field. Now the NES team, not just myself but a number of the team members here will be helping to facilitate the online discussion forum. We really want to take full advantage of this opportunity when there are so many people focused on this one question of innovation in the arts and culture space. Now before I send you on your way to start the class, I just wanted to point out one other option here in the class. On the left side of your screen, you'll see a tab that says the team project option. You can take this course all by yourself or you can do this with a team working on a project at the same time. If you choose to work on the project, it gives you a chance to use the ideas in practice and see how they apply and do that while you have access to the teaching team and to your colleagues and to ask questions, and get answers and responses. As I said, the team project option is an option, it's not required. We have seen in Dave's online class that folks who choose the project find it really helpful to get their hands dirty with the ideas and see how they apply, see what the subtle challenges are. With that, I'll leave it to you to read more on the team project option page. >> We're excited to work with you during this course. This is our own bit of innovation to bring our in person work into the cultural field in this online environment. We really do look forward to this experience with you.
