SeattlePrintmakersCenter

141017 Innovation + Entrepreneurship = Professional Development  

Innovation is huge.  

Entrepreneurship is huge. 

Add them together you have a formula for professional development. Confucius said words to the effect that a wise person does not have a profession; he or she just does the best they can. To check this, I switch to my database of quotes from books I read over the past fifty years.

Multitasking, I am at once thinking about professional development and my lack of a profession!

Yet, here I am, 72, nimbly working at my keyboard, composing lines with a plan to develop a cohort of people who want to utilize innovation, add it to entrepreneurship, and thus offer society a center for professional development, the Seattle Printmakers Center.

I mention my age—72—because I have kept up with technology and 50 years of change in the profession of college teaching, yet without a formal affiliation with an institution or association such as the Arts Administration Association of Educators—the inspiration for this essay.

Is art a profession? Is there a call for a Seattle Printmakers Center built on this formula—innovation plus entrepreneurship equals professional development?

Industrial art is a profession, to be sure—and numerous artists take home a paycheck, or payments for products delivered on time and at budget for contracts within various industries. Our system of art schools aims to prepare students for income-earning jobs and contracts, no doubt, and the industrial job market calls for trained, productive artists.

Innovation, however, is not expected of them in those jobs; usually the “innovative” work has been done somewhere near the top of the enterprise. Artists trained for industry may be disappointed to find that their creative capacities are hemmed in by consumer expectations. Consumers don’t pay for innovation—they buy products designed the way they like them.

The innovator’s dilemma is described by Clayton Christensen is that doing the right things can lead to failure. Sometimes it is wrong to listen to customers. Entrepreneurship is risk-taking. The two go together like bread and butter and, if artfully prepared, innovation and entrepreneurship can produce a center professional development.

How can this improbable combination of innovation and entrepreneurship be the basis for a center for professional development—the concept behind a Seattle Printmakers Center?

I turn to my personal experience to get an answer.

I am not a professional artist in terms of making consumer products. Otherwise I would not be writing this paper. I suppose a professional artist—and they might be working in a studio nearby—is, at this very moment, plying his or her art and craft, getting ready for the next gallery showing or commission. They may be writing a grant, or communicating with a team of designers of a public art project. She may be flying to meet with engineers, architects, and public art committees or returning from an opening in distant city—and glad to be home.

Or he may be walking the dog, or sipping coffee, or counting likes on Facebook. I try to imagine all these professionally-developed artists and arts administrators, and I wonder what—in this professionally-developed world—do I have to offer that would be a service our community?

It can only be an innovative concept for a new arts institution for Seattle, an entrepreneurial, risky venture concurrently engaging professional development.