Expanding on my first post, we need to:
- Identify what business wants from, thinks about, and considers the obstacles, challenges and opportunities to continued, substantive talks between the two sectors, and;
- Ascertain what changes in the arts sector’s approach to building meaningful coalitions and collaborative efforts are essential prerequisites to address the business community’s needs.
This knowledge would help the arts sector to move the status of potential collaborative efforts from the current “conceptual level” to more active status by developing strategies that could move towards specific action steps in fostering working alliances – by designing action steps that are in alignment with stated business needs. Specifically, it is incumbent on the arts sector to fully understand and appreciate what factors the business community identifies as essential for its involvement to be of benefit to them.
That kind of inquiry might include the following discussions with business:
- The relationship between creativity and innovation; how the concepts differ in theory and application.
- What skills business most values in prospective employees and the relationship between participation in the arts and the development of those skills.
- How creativity and innovation are defined in each sector, how skills in each are fostered, assessed and nourished?
- Identification of what factors would encourage business to fast track involvement with the arts – including barriers and obstacles.
- The linkage between current arts education and skills desired by business in prospective employees.
- How arts education is directly related to student interest in math and science, and to proficiency in each subject, including current research.
- How integration of the arts into the corporate culture might increase productivity, decrease employee absenteeism, improve staff communication, and add to changing “brand” images with the public.
- The relationship between creativity and the arts, and motivation, idea incubation, brand identity, public valuation, and technical skills development.
- The rise of the creative class and the role of imagination in the business sector.
- The changing global marketplace and American business competitiveness.
And that kind of dialogue would potentially yield these kinds of results:
- The ability to leverage the involvement of key, high-profile business leadership to widen and deepen the business community’s understanding of the potential benefits of a real, working relationship between the sectors.
- An opportunity to begin the process of institutionalizing open, on-going and productive lines of communication between the arts and business communities, both locally and nationally.
- A chance to dispel erroneous assumptions held by the business community relative to value of artistic skills, processes and experiences to workforce development
- The opportunity to advance a consensus-built mutual vocabulary defining language to be used in the discussion of areas of mutual interest such as creativity, innovation, entrepreneurialism, etc.
Unless and until we understand on a deeper level the business perspective on any relationship with the arts (which we do not now really have), there will be precious little advancement of that relationship.
Popularity: 19%
