One of the toughest challenges for any leader is getting traction for new ideas. Winning support can be a struggle. As a result, powerful new ideas often get stuck. This is especially true in the cultural sector. People involved in arts and culture often have little time and even less money for experimentation and risks. This course will help those in the performing arts, museums, zoos, libraries and other cultural organizations build environments where new management and program ideas are created, shared, evaluated and the best ones are successfully put to work.

Leading Innovation in Arts & Culture will teach your team how to make an "innovation strategy" a fundamental component of your organization's overall strategy. In this seminar you will learn to:

• Analyze constraints on innovation in your organization, foresee obstacles and opportunities, and develop a shared vision
  
• Develop a process to manage the demands of multiple stakeholders, shifting priorities and the uncertainty inherent in new initiatives
  
• Create a culture for innovation and risk-taking that generates new perspectives and challenges existing practice
  
• Create a strong customer focus within your organization that anticipates customer needs

National Arts Strategies worked with David Owens to customize this course for those working in the cultural sector. They based their work on David Owens’ Leading Strategic Innovation in Organizations course. This highly interactive 8-week course will engage your team through a series of class discussion and team exercises. The team from National Arts Strategies will use its deep experience working in this field to facilitate discussion among participants. They will also lead exercises to help you examine and change your current habits of thought and behavior. 

We introduce the approach of the class: instead of trying to be innovative, just stop stopping it. We discuss a framework for analyzing the six most common barriers (constraints) that stop innovation.

Psychologists treat innovation as a problem of having creative ideas; we sometimes stop innovation by not "thinking different." This week explores the constraints of perception, intellection and expression and offers strategies for overcoming them.

Social psychologists treat innovation as a group problem: we often don't get early support for our ideas because of adverse group dynamics. This week looks at the constraints of emotion, culture and process in groups as well as the environment within which groups work and looks at ways to overcome them.

The field of management sees the problem of innovation as one of the organization; organization is the opposite of innovation, after all. This week explores the constraints of strategy, structure and resources and we explore ways of framing them that will help us to overcome them.

An economist view of failed innovation sees it as a problem of adoption; when there's no market to adopt it, it's not an innovation, it's just a creative idea. We look at the constraints of competition, suppliers and markets and discuss strategies you can use to relax them.

The sociological and anthropological perspective suggests that societies control or obstruct innovations that are deemed as dangerous or contrary to societal values. This week explores the constraints of identity, social control, and history and we will seek an understanding of how we might avoid them.

Engineers and scientists see failed innovation as a failure of technology; if it doesn't work, it's not an innovation. Here we explore the constraints of knowledge, time and the natural environment. Rather than trying to overcome them, we develop strategies for working within these constraints.

The final week has us putting the entire model together into the leadership context. We will learn about innovation portfolios and discuss a tested process for moving innovations from ideas to realities.

This animated video describes the basic issues addressed by the course.