The 21st Century Experiential Classroom: Music Entrepreneurship Through the Coleman Foundation Faculty Entrepreneurship Fellowship
Sean Flanigan Colorado Mesa University.
Sean opens with an example of the ultimate entrepreneurial musician, citing Mozart as a portfolio-career musician (teaching, playing, composing).
A question: How can a music program afford not to have a Music Entrepreneurship track? All professional musicians (by definition) monetise their skills in some way, and Sean suggests that our curricula should have this philosophy embedded.
We now see an overview of the Coleman Foundation, the funding from which enables faculty to develop experiential learning for students [Sean is presumably a Coleman Fellow]. In Sean’s ‘Idea Challenge’ for students , he enables the development of student projects that are market-driven – they ask what outputs people need. When a need is identified, ideation, design, and marketing follow. Sean’s examples are not necessarily from music – he talks about engineering, products and services. [His goal seems to be to engender creative thinking rather than musically-specific entrepreneurship career routes… but maybe he’s getting to that…]
He now ‘defines the community’, using Colorado as his case study, citing various music activities, venues and projects near to his university, including his own El Sistema project, MusicSpark.
The session ends with a very productive few minutes, where audience members discuss with each other what they might do today to move their curricula forward towards entrepreneurial student activity.
Recent Comments