Lean-Entrepreneurship in Higher Music Education

This presentation discusses how lean entrepreneurship strategies can benefit students in higher music education. Lean entrepreneurship emerged as a method in the software industry to develop products faster and reduce the risk of economic loss. A key feature of this method is the minimal viable product (MVP) the basis for continuous iterations with customers.
The MVP is a means to learn from the market: to find out who the customers are, to learn what the customers value about the product, and to develop the product further based on feedback from customers. But how do these principles work when the product is not software but a music track – or another artistic creation of aesthetic value? Independent music artists in the post-digital era have access to more data than ever before about their customers. Still, many students are reluctant to work with this data because they find that iterations of music ‘products’ based on customer feedback challenge artistic integrity. Some even see entrepreneurship more broadly as antithetical to artistic practices.
In this presentation, I illustrate with examples from my teaching at Universities in Denmark, how lean entrepreneurship might be meaningfully integrated into the curricula, to help music students navigate the inherent instability of the music market.