Get started then start learning

Last week I did a sort of lecture at City University London for the students on their Masters in Innovation, Creativity and Leadership degree course. I was founding director there of the Centre for Creativity – and the MICL (as in “Taking the MICL”) was and is the best fruit from that time.

In reality the “lecture” took the form of a conversation between Marshall Marcus and myself (and the students), and Marshall talked about El Sistema, the project in Venezuela where kids from all backgrounds get involved in playing music in orchestras.

In Venezuela there are now 400,000 children participating, and there are El Sistema-style projects flowering around the world.

“Usually, kids who start to play instruments first spend several years learning before they think about joining an orchestra,” said Marshall. “But in El Sistema they join an orchestra at the beginning and, through that involvement, start the journey of learning how to play.”

How many other areas could that thinking be applied to?

Taking the MICL

Top priority, since I joined City University in London to set up their Centre for Creativity, has been the development of an interdisciplinary Masters in Innovation, Creativity and Leadership – the MICL.

That’s done now and over the past two weeks we have started the marketing campaign for it. A real opportunity, it seemed to me, for the marketing communications folk in the university to strut their stuff with this unique new offering.

Not so fast!

Because the Centre itself is interdisciplinary, the marketing people in the School of Informatics, where we live, said, “Sorry, you’re not part of our School. Nothing to do with us, Guv.” And the people in the corporate team said, “We don’t market academic courses, that’s all done by the specialists in the Schools. Nothing to do with us, Guv.”

The consequence has been that we decided to hire a dynamic, hungry young team at Claremont, who helped us shape up a complete strategy and plan, and went on to develop a range of exciting and unusual marketing materials.

The one I like best is the video they created for us, which links a Big City Brainstorm we ran together with the new Masters: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqVqU-c00lE

The MICL is designed to give innovation leaders all the tools to turn ideas into action. It’s a two-year programme for people with experience who are looking for accelerated career progression.

You can read more about it here: http://creativity.city.ac.uk/master/overview.html

Something for you? Or for a colleague?