Innovation Institute - Transforming Leaders

TRANSFORMING LEADERS THROUGH ARTIST-LED LEARNING

Since 2005, the Innovation Institute has delivered powerful artist-led programs to over fifty global companies. Our programs offer transformational learning experiences for individuals, teams, and organizations through customized programs led by professional artists and expert facilitators. The programs are not designed to make you an artist, but rather to instill the critical and innovative thinking that artists apply throughout their creative process. This experiential process of artist-led learning results in behaviors that challenge, connect, and stimulate change in the participants and the people they lead.

OUR UNIQUE APPROACH

Artist-led

Expertly facilitated for deep learning & application

explores artist creative process

Hands on

ARTIST-LED CURRICULUM The Innovation Institute is led by accomplished, professional artists who continually push the limits of possibilities, risks, and rewards. In each session, our artists and expert facilitators reveal the creative process. While other creativity programs focus primarily on creativity tools such as ideation and problem solving, the Innovation Institute program offers a transformational shift in creative capacity.

SAMPLE SESSION THEMES

• UNLOCKING THE CREATIVE VOICE

• SOURCING THE IMAGINATION

• COURAGE IN THE FACE OF STRUGGLE

• RISK & THE VALUE OF FAILURE

• PUSHING THE EDGE

• DIFFERENTIATION: BEYOND THE PREDICTABLE

THE EXPERIENCE Artists live and breathe the creative process every day. They offer windows through which to see the world differently. They approach pressing problems in original and inventive ways and provide opportunity for a breakthrough of stagnant thought. Artmaking experiences are selected with the specific target audience in mind.

THE FLOW OF OUR PROGRAMS OFTEN BEGINS WITH: An artist intimately sharing their work and creative process followed by a handson artmaking activity led by the artist. Our expert facilitator will guide the participants through a debrief after the exercise is complete to provide rich and meaningful connections back to business and leadership.

FOR EXAMPLE, GROUPS INTERESTED IN RELATIONSHIP-BUILDING COULD: Use opaque illustration pens to capture the creative expression of an individual’s gesture on a sheet of transparent paper. Breaking into small groups, the individual sheets of transparent paper are combined and layered using experimentation, listening, and editing to form a collaborative drawing.

Once the layered piece is complete, individuals are given a viewfinder to identify a small segment of their group’s drawing that they feel reflects the team’s strength.

Identified segments are then replicated by the individuals using tracing paper and markers to create a unique individual artwork.

Each of the final artworks are displayed in a “gallery” format where the facilitator and artist guide a debrief highlighting: intuitive response, imagination, diversity of expression, talent in group, contribution to the whole, and shifts in perception.

THE EXPERIENCE All programs ensure participants experience the key elements of the artist’s creative process such as: risk taking, courage in the face of failure, experimentation, working through ambiguity, deep observation, accessing intuition, ability to synthesize, curiosity, playfulness, or storytelling.

HANDS-ON EXPERIENCE COULD INCLUDE: • Gesture drawing: reveals the intuitive response, authentic self, and value of improvisation • Group sculpture: motivates teams, builds relationships, and collaborative skills • Self-portraits: reveals the leader within • Silkscreening: promotes value of unchartered terriories, flexibility, and reinvention • Abstrat art: presents issues from new perspectives while promoting inventiveness • Collage: sources the imagination and explore limits

OUR MODEL: TRANSFORMATIONAL LEARNING The Innovation Institute uses a transformational learning approach that results in a significant impact for the participants. We expand learning from the head and fully engage the heart and hands to produce far-reaching change in the learner.

HIGH

Skill

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HIGH

PROGRAM OUTCOMES Leaders site tangible impact from the Innovation Institute programs resulting in: • Increased employee engagement and retention • Faster time to market for new product development • Creation of new business models • Increased productivity in ranges from 20-50% • Launching successful new businesses • Career promotions • Higher performing and collaborative teams • Significant growth in leadership effectiveness

PARTIAL CLIENT LIST Innovation Institute has also formed partnerships with top executive education organizations in the world including number one ranked Duke Corporate Education* *According to The Financial Times, 2013 Business School Rankings

The Innovation Institute was founded in 2005 by McColl Center for Visual Art President/ CEO, Suzanne Fetscher. Her vision was to forge a connection around the topic of creativity between the corporate community of Charlotte and McColl Center for Visual Art, a leading artist in residency program. She recognized that artists, who live and breathe the creative process as part of daily life, could provide a uniquely meaningful contribution to corporations and other organizations seeking to instill creativity and innovative ideas among their leaders.

McColl Center for Visual Art is a nationally acclaimed contemporary art center dedicated to connecting art and artists with the community. Located in a historic, neo-Gothic church in Uptown Charlotte, the Center houses nine artist studios and over 5,000 square feet of gallery space.