Collaborative Innovation: Exploring the Intersections among Theater, Art and Business in the Classroom

Abstract

There is a long history of conversations about integrating business and arts-based learning, but they are taking on more urgency today as technology-induced change and global interconnectivity are altering how humans learn, create, and construct new knowledge in unprecedented ways. However, there is much still to be learned about how the disciplines might be integrated and in what ways they can jointly serve the development not only of university students, but of how professional practice itself is defined. Over the past three years, faculty from the Theater and Dance Performance Studies, Art Practice, and Business disciplines at UC Berkeley have collaborated to create a course, Collaborative Innovation, that explores both collaboration and innovation at the intersection of these three fields. This paper presents a framework for a genuinely integrated interdisciplinary class that interweaves personal development and growth with problem framing and solving skills, and diverse-team participation and leadership. Quotes from student reflection papers bring alive the transformational experiences students went through in this course. The integration of socially engaged art, business, and theater/performance through collaborative teamwork tackling important and challenging social problems opens unexpected potential for student development as future contributors to society.

A Collaborative Model for Leadership Education in High-Potential University Women Students

“…This module was a turning point that had a leverage effect on the acquisition of other competencies, an improvement in their motivation and in self-confidence. The integration of business and arts-based learning has been successfully used in other courses with Collaborative Innovation at UC Berkeley, which connected personal development to diverse-team participation and leadership skills [24].…”

“…Table 2 shows the evolution of the contents of the program up to its third edition. The training incorporated the improvements mentioned above, attempting to integrate the three modes of attention that the leader manages in their teams "inners, others, outers" [24,79]. Specifically, the first module incorporated a meeting with the CEO of a multinational so that they could learn about the context in which they would develop their professional activity, but without forgetting the social context (outers) and a very necessary aspect, the professional and personal experience of the leading speaker, as a reference (inners, outers), an often repeated requirement in the focus groups.…”

“…Likewise, the OI approach is used for entrepreneurial education, focusing on cooperation between industry and universities to prepare students for corporate entrepreneurial thinking [21], by identifying the most effective teaching methods to enhance the main stakeholders' motivation and improve higher education training in entrepreneurial competences of employability [22,23]. Beckman et al [24] highlight collaborative innovation through an integrated interdisciplinary course that interweaves personal development and growth with problem solving skills, and diverse-team participation and leadership.…”

Pedagogical Innovation: Towards Conservation Psychology and Sustainability

“…The result of a meta-analysis developed over a period of 20 years (1993 -2013), on the arts used as a teaching and research instrument, the theater was the most common performing art used [22]. At the University of Carolina at Berkeley College of Arts and Sciences in 2016, 2017, and 2018 with students (151) from different majors: computer science, engineering, economics, architecture, sociology, environmental studies, chemical and biological sciences, the "collaborative innovation" class was created for the integration of art, business and theater, the result was that collaborative teamwork, helps tackle social problems, and opens up unexpectedly challenging potential for the development of students as future contributors to society [23].…”

Not Just an Academic Exercise: Systems Thinking Applied to Designing Safer Alternatives

“…Literature on design thinking articulates four distinct capabilities: the ability to observe and notice; frame and reframe; imagine and design; and make and experiment. 26 Each step of the inquiry process involves significant feedback among the four elements, in that, for example, observations can reveal that an initial problem-framing left something out and can inform the process of reframing the problem.…”