Another company that has benefited from using arts in its approach is Angel Trains, a U.K. rail and train leasing company. The company once partnered with Oracle Computing to install a major piece of IT infrastructure over a period of 18 months. The company wanted the staffs of the two organizations, Angel and Oracle, to blend well and avoid an “us and them” mentality. In the first few weeks of the partnership, the staffs were brought together to learn to improvise through music with the help of a rock/pop/jazz ensemble. (For more music-based business applications see http://www.academy-of-rock.co.uk/teambuilding.)
Unilever, a global consumer products company, once found itself beginning to lose market share and needed to build a more entrepreneurial culture. The company started “Catalyst,” an arts-based learning program. Actors and poets were brought in to facilitate discussions. Paintings were chosen by staff. The artistic process used in the day-to-day workings of the firm encouraged employees to develop new ideas. The process is documented in a white paper, “Solving Business Problems Through the Creative Power of the Arts” by Mary-Ellen Boyle and Edward Ottensmeyer.
“I have done this for one simple reason, and that is for my division to become a better business,” said James Hill, a Unilever group vice president, in the white paper.
“I’m pretty straightforward,” he said. “I’m a 43-year-old businessman. I’ve been in a multinational company since I left the university, about 20 years, and had virtually no contact with the arts world before Catalyst started up. I had followed an extremely conventional path that had been very productive for me and very successful in many ways, but I was at a point when I wanted to see whether there were other things in life that I could explore. And I was resentful, in a way, and felt that I had been cut off from the more creative sides of life.”
Emily Lutzker, a former artist and founder of innovation consultancy OpenInvo, says that a key concept for artists is “disruption” of the status quo, one of the key things they do when they innovate.
"If you want real disruption,” she says, “start talking to artists. Disruption is central to their thinking and their value system. If you want incremental innovation, any traditional focus group can tell you how to inch forward."
If you add more innovation and creativity to your business, you enter a fascinating realm of cross-industry ideas and experience, of exploration and building of “new” industry best practices and business models and of continuous, practical learning beyond your normal borders.
It is also the single best benefit to becoming a “Founding Innovator” member of the Institute for Innovation Development.
The Institute for Innovation Development is an educational and business development catalyst for growth-oriented financial services firms. The founding sponsor partners include Innovation Equity Partners, Pershing, Ultimus Fund Solutions, Fidelity, Meridian IQ/Advice IQ and Charter Financial Publishing (the publisher of Financial Advisor and Private Wealth magazines). Together, we help make innovation happen. For more information or to join the institute, click here.