Intersection of Arts and Innovation with Clive Chang, Lincoln Center's Chief Advancement and Innovation Officer

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Clive Chang, Chief Advancement and Innovation Officer at Lincoln Center. Clive and I talk about the intersection of arts and innovation and how people in organizations can embrace new ideas, experiments, and new audiences to create new opportunities and experiences. Let's get started. 

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Clive Chang, Chief Advancement and Innovation Officer at Lincoln Center

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Clive Chang. Clive is the Chief Advancement and Innovation Officer at Lincoln Center, which is the world's largest and best-known cultural venue in the world. Housing things like the Metropolitan Opera, New York Philharmonic, New York City Ballet, American ballet Theater, and the list goes on and on and on. So, Clive thank you for coming on the show. 

Clive Chang: Thanks so much for having me great to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: Well, I'm so excited to have you on this show because the arts and innovation are not a topic that's often covered. And you've got such an interesting background and, and role when it comes to this space. 

From my understanding your background, you're a musician, you're a composer, you're a businessperson. You used to work at Disney, and now you lead Lincoln Center's innovation efforts. How did you get interested in this innovation space and helping companies and organizations innovate better? 

Clive Chang: Thanks for asking. You know, I am a classically trained musician. I come from a long history of being an artist. And I also come from sort of a multitude of different forces and influences in my life. One of them being strict Asian parents, who forbade me from studying music in college for fear that it would never lead me to a fruitful career. And so, I was also rooted in very practical sort of traditions growing up.

And really serendipitously found this intersection of business and art through pursuing studies in both fields. I will say also that as I was in my formative years and college and shortly thereafter, I was also seeing a lot of arts institutions financially flailing, right? Orchestras going bankrupt, et cetera. So that really piqued my interest. 

And I saw this opportunity that somebody who was trained from the ground up both on the creative side and on the business side could really fill for the world. And that was really helping creative and artistic organizations thrive. And I sort of found that niche quite early on and fueled my further training onward to really pursue that.

And innovation, I think really is something opportunistic that I ran into. Right. And you don't get very many nonprofit art CEOs that say outwardly that innovation is their top priority. Right. And so, coming across Henry Timms, his appointment and his not only external commitment to innovation, but also his track record of having done it in the sector prior to coming to Lincoln Center was just too good to be true. And so, I very happily came on and have been really enjoying working with him to really reimagine some things in the sector. 

Brian Ardinger: It is pretty interesting when you think about artists and creatives, you automatically think of them as innovative type of spirits. Where, you know, they're constantly doing new and interesting kind of things, but oftentimes that doesn't seem to apply to the organizations themselves.

Most arts organizations have been around for, you know, years or even centuries with similar business models and similar ways of displaying the arts and that. Why is it so important for institutions to level up today and think more about innovation as a core competency? 

Clive Chang: Yeah, you are so right. It's almost astounding that organizations that house so many brilliant creative outside of the box talents fail to really make full use of them in an institutional and organizational context.

I would consider organizations like Lincoln Center legacy institutions. And while Lincoln Center is only about 60 years old, a lot of the art that's presented on this campus is centuries old, right? Very much rooted in tradition. And I think that's probably one keyword that ends up being a bit of a fallback or a crutch, that many arts organizations use, especially ones that present classical art.

I always joke that the performing arts are one of the very, very few things in the world that we still as humans experience in the exact same way as we did like 200 years ago. Right. How many things in the world, can you say that about? When you think about it, we still file into a specific venue on a specific date. At a specific time. We sit for two hours, three hours, four hours. I mean, in the case of opera, it could be, you know, eight, 8 million hours. 

We passively watch other humans perform. We clap. We exit. The only difference today is we turn off our cell phones. Right? Because we have cell phones. So, another force I think that makes it important for us to really lean into the idea of innovating is that we're cyclical.

The typical performing arts company operates in this sort of annual seasonal cycle, right? So, you have a typical fall season. You have a spring season. In our case at Lincoln Center, we have a robust summer season, where we take advantage of warm weather and we take advantage of one of our greatest assets, which is outdoor space. Which not everyone in Manhattan has obviously.

So, being able to really take advantage of that, but the problem with the tradition and the annual cycles put together is that if we don't execute with the intention of breaking out of the tradition in the cycles, it just leads to same old, same old, same old, right. And that's the kind of, I think unintended inertia that really takes hold in legacy organizations, especially in the performing arts field like ours, if we don't actively push back against it and continuously challenge it. Right.

Brian Ardinger: One of the interesting things that may have happened, obviously over the last couple years with the pandemic, it's forced a lot of these organizations to rethink not only in the arts, but everywhere. But so, talk a little bit about how the pandemic and made Lincoln Center adapt or think differently about what they do.

Clive Chang: Right. Sometimes it does take an inciting incident, right? Or like this moment of crisis, like COVID 19 to rattle us and create that urgency to really approach things differently. In our case, I would actually frame it as to encourage us to accelerate the change. And I say that because Henry Timms, who took the reins in 2019, the year before the pandemic, you know, was very clear about innovation and institutional change as key priorities when he set his vision coming in. 

But you're right. What drew me back to Lincoln Center, I rejoined. I was here a decade ago and came back a month into the lockdown. And like, it's kind of an odd time to...