Entrepreneurshp in Music and the Arts, 2nd Class Report

So even from my own (humble) assessment, the 2nd class was a huge success, going beyond my expectations.

Approximately half the students (15) pitched their ideas to the class. Each had 2 minutes for their presentations, plus a bit more time to answer clarifying questions. After each pitch, the student taped a paper to the wall with h/her project’s name on it.

After all the pitches, each student then gave a 15 second description of h/her project, as a reminder. What was so interesting about this was how easily each could encapsulate the essence of h/her project so easily.

Each student in the class was then given 3 sticky dots and was instructed to ‘vote’ with them. They could place all 3 on one project, or do otherwise. After the voting I removed those project pages that had 2, one or no stickers on them. Then
spontaneously the students starting finding similarities between projects, and began negotiating mergers. After discussion one merger occurred and 6 projects were selected.

To form the teams I asked each student to list h/her first, second and third choices, the invited 2nd year grad students to select their team, then 1st year grads, then seniors, juniors and sophomores (there are no freshmen in the class). The seniority-based approach was accepted by the class as a fair method of selection.

I closed each team at 5 members.

The teams had 15 minutes to meet each other and informally discuss their projects. Next week they will organize to build their business plans. In a future post I will ask each team to describe their projects and post them for comment.