On Orchestras and Innovation

While almost every business or organizational leader will say innovation is necessary, there is often no broad consensus on how to put that into action.

Karen Dillon has studied and written about the topic for the Harvard Business Journal for many years, and she explained during the SHIFT Festival of American Orchestras Symposium that a recent survey showed while 84% of business leaders said innovation was a priority, 94% of those were extremely dissatisfied with how their company performed in the area.

In short, Dillon said, there are a lot of very smart people trying to figure innovation out, but the fail rate is extremely high. Over a 40-year period, 20,000 new products were launched (each the subject of a lot of time and energy) and only 92 saw lasting success.

One of the reasons for this failure rate, Dillon told orchestra leaders and practitioners, was a fundamental misunderstanding of your own product and why customers consume it.

“People don’t just buy products or services. They hire them to do a job for them,” she said. “That might sound like a simple language change, but we think it’s a profound difference.”

The question then, is what job is a ticket-buying public hiring an orchestra to do for them? Dillon pointed to the words of the founder of Netflix when asked about Amazon’s competing streaming video service who said, “We compete with everything you use to relax. A bottle of wine may be our toughest competitor.”

“If you realize you are not just competing with things exactly like you, you completely broaden your opportunity to innovate and bring people to you,” Dillon said.

Additionally, the most successful startups and innovators didn’t try to compete with like products, but instead competed with nothing. Air BnB, for example, wasn’t competing with hotels but competing with not taking that trip at all or staying with friends. If you are competing with like products, she said, you must be wildly better to overcome consumer’s habits and risk aversion, which often will cause consumer’s not to seek out a new product that is only marginally better than what they are used to.

Rethinking the Organizational Structure
Dillon encouraged orchestras like all businesses to think about “the job to be done” that their audience is hiring them for. Part of the orchestral mission has always included education or outreach efforts, but often that is a standalone department that doesn’t interface regularly with the departments in charge of putting on weekly concerts.

Stanford Thompson said during a SHIFT Symposium panel that he would like to see orchestras rethink their structure and reevaluate how closely the mission to educate and the mission to perform are linked. Thompson is a trumpet player and artistic director of the El Sistema-style program Play on Philly. Orchestras, he said, have gone through many shifts in their approach and focus, but often their original purpose was to accomplish a social mission in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

“These were immigrants coming to America. They were setting up new communities, be they Minneapolis or Chicago or Philly or Baltimore or New York or Cincinnati or Cleveland. What was important to keep those communities together was their culture and their identity,” Thompson said. “A lot of that revolved around classical music and orchestras. The musicians played an important role in making sure music schools were set up and orchestras were established and [the two] were actually working hand in hand.”

As both music schools and orchestras became increasingly professionalized through the latter 20th century, those missions started to separate. But given recent financial and accessibility challenges to music education, particularly in cities, Thompson said orchestras would do well to invest time and resources into that part of the original mission as it is where future audiences for this music are developed.

“What I look at the SHIFT Festival, I think of hope that the shift we make is that we will no longer divorce those who play music and those who teach music,” he said.

Tension around Innovation

League of American Orchestras President Jesse Rosen told the SHIFT audience that there is an inherent tension when discussing change and innovation in the orchestral world. There have been many attempts at new programs or strategies, and many have been unsuccessful, which can cause skepticism about future initiatives. But perhaps a bigger hurdle is a fear that what might be popular or financially successful might not be what is most artistically fulfilling, and that will create pressure to turn orchestras into something they are not.

Kevin Shuck, Executive Director of the Boulder Philharmonic, said he believes there is an inevitable tension when you go outside the box in a traditional art form. Shuck said innovation is important, but he said his organizational culture doesn’t approach it in those terms.

“I really don’t like to think we’re trying to innovate all the time. That’s not really the vocabulary that we use. Instead we’re trying to be creative,” Shuck said. “The the end result is often that what you’re programming is innovative, but we’re not assuming that in and of itself as our goal.”

Different for the sake of different, he added, can lead you down a wrong path. But following the art and creativity can lead to a more authentic form of innovation.

For orchestras, innovation can often be a risky financial venture. North Carolina Symphony President Sandi Macdonald said that when they recently experimented with a new program series, they looked to remove some of that financial tension and bring their musicians into the programming model so there was more artistic buy-in from the start.

Macdonald said that they were trying to target “that elusive millennial audience.” In the past they experimented with a concert model that tried to feature classical hybrid music, and their marketing efforts included street teams and food trucks all aimed at that audience. The difficulty with this model, which has been tried in some form across the country, is that the financial stakes are high. This model requires paying a large number of musicians and filling a concert hall, all with tickets from outside your core audience.

Instead, Macdonald said they wanted to try lowering the financial stakes by taking some of that money and approaching their musicians to develop a smaller scale program that could be held in a club in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina.

“That was an example of it making sense both in terms of resources and inspiration,” she said.