Innovation Lab for the Performing Arts
Announcing Round 7 of The Innovation Lab for the Performing Arts, designed and managed by EmcArts, with the generous support of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. The Lab is a 12-month program that helps performing arts organizations incubate and test innovative strategies to address major adaptive challenges.Most arts institutions operate using constantly stretched resources and consequently struggle to implement truly new ideas. At the same time, however, the capacity of American arts organizations to innovate—to find new pathways to mission fulfillment that are discontinuous from previous practice and that result from shifts in underlying organizational assumptions—is and will be a leading indicator of sustained marketplace success and viability.
The Innovation Lab was designed to serve as a catalyst for the journey to these new pathways: to help arts organizations challenge core operating assumptions, engage in intense planning on a practical innovation project, create a sense of organization-wide investment in change, and test innovative strategies with grants that help organizations prototype new practices.
The three-phase Innovation Lab provides a strong framework within which new strategies can be explored and prototyped in relatively low-stakes environments before a full launch:
Phase 1: EmcArts works with organization to identify an Innovation Team (of up to 10 people) at each participating organization, which then defines project goals and success measures, and conducts pertinent research
Phase 2: Innovation Teams from all participating organizations attend a 5-day Intensive retreat that serves as a “project accelerator,” giving teams time to focus on their projects
Phase 3: EmcArts grants Lab participants seed grant money to prototype and evaluate their innovative strategy before full launch.
Phase 2: Innovation Teams from all participating organizations attend a 5-day Intensive retreat that serves as a “project accelerator,” giving teams time to focus on their projects
Phase 3: EmcArts grants Lab participants seed grant money to prototype and evaluate their innovative strategy before full launch.
The Program provides a needed antidote to the general trend of throwing resources, time and energy toward flavor-of-the-month initiatives that seem attractive in turbulent times.
—Innovation Lab for the Performing Arts Program Evaluator Elizabeth Long Lingo, Vanderbilt University
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