Silicon Halton Meetup #101 – Entrepreneurship: Creating a Culture for Innovation

 Jazz, Innovation and Entrepreneurship Do Mix! 

Our March meetup brings LIVE jazz, innovation and entrepreneurial thinking together! Whether you own a business or work in one or the public sector having an innovation and entrepreneurial mindset is an asset. We’ve tapped into our community and have a special treat for SH members and guests. It’s something new and at a new location! SH member Brian Hayman and his jazz ensemble will entertain us with their musical talents while getting us to think about ways we can innovative and entrepreneurial! 

In environments characterized by uncertainty and continuous change, the success of our enterprises will depend on our capacity for innovation; figuring out stuff on the fly. To put it in other words, we will need to develop a capacity for improvisation. The essence of jazz is collective improvisation and depends on the spontaneous, dynamic and creative interplay of the performing artists. But improvising isn’t winging it!  The freedom so essential for its performance, however, is grounded in a rigorous individual and collective discipline. The makers of jazz music figured out a long time ago how a diverse but highly interdependent collection of individuals can perform collaboratively and put the theory of synergy into practice.

To the extent that improvisation is about experimentation and exploration, an innovative culture which fosters entrepreneurialism and inventiveness is essential.

A performance by world class teaching, recording and touring jazz musicians of Getting in the Groove serves as the experiential ground for the programme and a basis for an exploration of the conditions needed for:

• • creating a culture that fosters innovation
  • treating uncertainty as an opportunity rather than a threat
  • encouraging risk-taking while seeing mistakes as learning opportunities
  • fostering an openness to voices with something new to say
  • seeing diversity as a source of creativity by developing multiple perspectives on complex problems.

Featured musicians include: Juno-award winning Jazz Saxophonist, Composer and Arranger, Allison Au and bassist Carlie Howell.  

About Getting in the Groove

Getting in the Groove represents a synthesis of Brian Hayman’s varied experience as a metallurgist in a steel company, an executive in a financial services organization, an organizational consultant in a global professional service firm, an adult educator, a jazz pianist and, above all, someone with an abiding interest in how people, individually and collectively, learn. These vocational and avocational interests were brought together in Getting in the Groove, a program that explores jazz as an improvisational art form and its implications for organizational, institutional and community change, innovation and learning.