Greetings from innovation-land

Foundations and other funders seeking to promote innovation in cultural organizations tend to wrestle with two main problems. One, of course, is to find and foster innovative practice in an industry that’s often just barely treading water. The other is to share those innovations beyond the inner circle of the project participants. Published reports are long and dry and often go unread. Conference presentations or workshops about the innovations are expensive in both time and money, and reach only a limited audience.

Which is why I rather like the idea of the audio postcard, short little stories of arts innovations, told by the people who made them happen.

EmcArts has posted 16 such audio postcards on its ArtsFwd website, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Each offers short narratives about a different Cultural Innovation Fund project from 2011, with a slide show for flavor and flair.

I’m not sure why the media files aren’t embeddable — making them even more easy to share (I can only link to the website, not post a postcard directly on this blog, for example). [UPDATE: Turns out the files can be embedded, but you have to go their Vimeo home for the code. See the ArtsFwd comment to this post for the direct links.] But it’s an innovative idea for spreading good ideas in quick and easy chunks.

Wish you were here.

Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts from ArtsFwd on Vimeo.