Written by: Michael Weigel, O’Neill MPA student
While many people were quarantined at home, the Center for Cultural Affairs and the Arts, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation Lab at the O’Neill School worked diligently to bring those in the creative sector together to look toward the ever-evolving future of the arts in a post-COVID world.
On June 9, 2020, CCA organizers hosted a virtual research workshop entitled Leveraging Creativity. The event included presentation and discussion of new scholarly work from dozens of researchers around the world focused on arts, entrepreneurship, and the creative sector. Even while remaining socially distanced, the event was a successful opportunity for dynamic discussion of pressing topics within this discipline and strongly contributed to the advancement of arts entrepreneurship research.
Several of the papers focused on the role of arts organizations, interventions, and entrepreneurs in the field. Their topics ranged from their impact on student development to professional settings to communities at large.
- At the undergraduate level, one study looked at arts education through theater courses has been shown to help college students from all majors develop empathetic traits in ways that reinforce the importance of arts education for students, employers and education professionals.
- Once those students graduate and enter the workforce, more new research explored the ways in which an artist’s presence impacts decision-making dynamics in the public sector. The results of that experiment indicated that residency programs allowed for intrapreneurial artists to enhance organizational innovativeness via the creativity and novelty of their contributions to public-sector problem-solving. The figure below shows the disparities in how experts rated the contributions of control groups versus groups with artists in the dimensions of creativity, novelty, and usefulness.