Description
1-2 Discussion: Introduction
Dan Hunter posted Jan 5, 2022 2:41 PM
Good afternoon Professor and classmates. My name is Dan Hunter and I am currently an active duty military musician. As far as my educational background, I have two music performance degrees, one from a small state school in New England and one from a conservatory in New York. My professional background is also in music. I spent 7 years as a freelance musician and part time college professor until joining the military as a musician. I have very recently moved for work, however my wife and children need to stay at our previous location for many personal and professional reasons. I will soon get out of the military and am hoping to enter the civilian business sector. Since I have very little background in business innovation, I am hoping to gain knowledge from this course of ways to innovate in my next career.
I had the opportunity at my first command to help conceptualize how we would perform at an upcoming television spot. I am a tuba player and regularly perform in brass quintets, and since we are a military organization I found myself playing the piccolo solo from Stars and Stripes with the brass quintet on almost every ceremony. I thought it would be interesting for both the audience and the musicians if the piccolo player and I split the solo into small segments. He would play some, and then I would play some, all while standing in front of the whole band together. The conductor thought it was a great idea and we eventually performed on a live morning show, bringing a unique expression of our national march to many households in the U.S. This innovation, while not generating income, was designed to open peoples minds to what military music is, what it can be, what the tuba can do, and how it can capture people’s imaginations. As a father of two small children at the time, I knew kids really enjoyed both the sight and sound of the tuba. We were hoping the kids watching at home with their parents would be excited, and want their parents and schools to bring our group in for more concerts thereby creating a new service for us to provide to the public. Bright ideas when implemented well can lead to valued new services and the efficient delivery of existing ones at a time when pressure on national purse strings is becoming ever tighter (Tidd, 2021). This innovation, while small, led me to performing this solo quite frequently with my first command for the remainder of my time there. It has also generated an opportunity for more tuba players within our community to do the same or perform other featured works. I learned at my first command that new ideas were great, welcomed, and could have a positive impact on both my personal work environment as well as the community involvement with our unit.
The innovations I saw most recently in my job were during the pandemic, switching from in person concerts/ceremonies to social media platform based pre-recorded music videos. No one at our command had any real professional experience with this type of project, let alone how to put this together when everyone was using different equipment in their own homes with different acoustics. It was a steep learning curve, but eventually many of the initial obstacles were figured out. As a lifelong performing musician, it was very interesting to see how innovative our group needed to be to stay relevant and stay working with new creative tools. This mimicked a lot of civilian professional musicians trying to connect with people, while also staying distanced and safe during a challenging time in our history.
References
Tidd, J., Bessant, J. R., Kouzes, J. M., & Posner, B. Z. (2021). Innovation, Strategy, and High-Performance Organizations for Southern New Hampshire University. Wiley Global Education US. https://wileyplus.vitalsource.com/books/9781119850…
Direction:
In response to two peers, address the following about their examples of innovation and creativity:
How will they incorporate their innovative ideas into an environment of constant change?
How does constant change affect an organization’s ability to innovate?
For your response posts, do the following: