Lecture Performance: Tuning in to Organizational Innovation – Music as a Metaphor to Understand the Improvisational Field in Organizations

Topic: Managing Organizations
Invited Session: Enabling Collaborative Innovation

Christopher Dell/Wolfgang Stark

Tuning in to organizational innovation – music as a metaphor to
understand the improvisational field in organizations

Ausschnitt aus dem Essay:

<What allows today´s companies and organizations to be innovative in a complex world?
How can we disclose the secrets of an innovative culture in organizations?
Can musical language and a technology of improvisation play a major role as an innovative
approach to meet today´s challenges in organizing complex processes?

Many have tried to understand why some organizations are innovative and creative and manage to
adapt to today´s complexity while others are not. As organizations face increasing uncertainty and
complexity, they will need to invent solutions to problems which cannot be anticipated – or even
imagined – in advance. In this climate, new knowledge and insight will be created and shared through
new types of conversations. These new conversations will need to be deeply creative – as much as
the kind of collaborative conversations artists have as they work together. One of the most complex
kinds of artistic conversations are musical conversations; the spontaneous and yet highly skilled and
present improvisations between musicians.

Our research project “Music_Innovation_Corporate Culture” (www.micc-project.org) – being part of
a research cluster on “Innovations Strategies Beyond Traditional Management” funded by the
German Government – tries to use new knowledge for the process of organizing (Weick) in
companies, organizational networks and innovative collaborative processes. In our quest to disclose
the secret of innovative organizational cultures we try to identify the patterns of innovative cultures
by linking organizational settings by using musical thinking and the patterns of improvisation.>

 

“Tuning in to Organizational Innovation – Music as a Metaphor to Understand the Improvisational Field in Organizations”, Universität Coimbra.