Synopsis
We live in the Age of Knowledge but we are heading towards the Age of Imagination. However, our current education systems still divide arts and business, juxtaposing them as different worlds, apparently ignoring the essential truth that imagination is the springboard of innovation. For business to continue to evolve, the barriers to creativity and innovation must be lowered.
In Innovation and the Arts: The Value of Humanities Studies for Business, editors Piero Formica and John Edmondson bring together a cast of expert contributors to explore how arts education can transform future business and social endeavours by developing empathy and enhancing skills frequently identified as lacking in graduates entering the workplace. Looking at arts and humanities across the broad spectrum of business and social innovation, and in the context of business education, examples of entrepreneurial and innovative developments, and the nature of the innovative mind, the contributors show how underdeveloped empathy and creativity constrain innovation. Art is disruptive, and innovation requires disruption to thrive.
By dwelling on the need for the convergence of business, innovation and the arts, Innovation and the Arts highlights the inestimable value of lowering the psychological, organizational and institutional barriers that keep them apart. This is an in-depth discussion designed to stimulate awareness of the issues facing business education.
About the authors
Piero Formica is currently a Senior Research Fellow of the Innovation Value Institute at Maynooth University in Ireland. Professor Formica received the Innovation Luminary Award in 2017 from the EU’s Open Innovation Science and Policy Group for his work on modern innovation policy. Previous publications with Emerald include Grand Transformation Towards an Entrepreneurial Economy: Exploring the Void, 2015, and Exploring the Culture of Open Innovation: Towards an Altruistic Model of Economy, 2018.
John Edmondson is an editor, writer and publishing consultant and an independent scholar in Victorian Studies. He is Editor of the bimonthly journal Industry and Higher Education. His previous books include Entrepreneurship and Knowledge Exchange, co-edited with Jay Mitra, 2015; Dickens on France, 2006 and Traveller?s Literary Companion to France, 1996.
