The JSoM OECD’s annual Innovation Competition was held on Saturday, 4 February 2023, at the Kelley School of Business. Featuring fourteen finalists, the jury chose one grand prize winner, a runner-up, and named five honorable mentions. The competition held first an application round, before hosting a live elevator pitch round, and finally a five-minute project presentation before a jury panel including Professor Donald F. Kuratko (Kelley School of Business,) Senior Executive Assistant Dean Travis Brown (Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering,) Assistant Dean Melissa Dickson (Jacobs School of Music,) and Assistant Director for the Arts Holly Warren (City of Bloomington).
This year’s competition was funded by Frank Graves, the IU Johnson Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation, and IU Ventures.
First Place Winner: Sadie O’Conor, Unsung Opera ($6,000)“We’re all really devoted to this project and are fortunate to have a really talented large group of people. Now I’m excited to go and tell them so we can get to work!” – Sadie O’ConorUnsung Opera is an interdisciplinary collaboration of performers and scholars to stage and record historical operas written by women. These works were influential in their own time but were unjustly kept out of traditional repertoire and thus they have never been recorded. The project will culminate in April with performances of the selected operas in Bloomington. Because the operas involve important feminist issues, we will work with local women’s’ organizations so these historical works can truly serve our community. The final performances will be recorded and published online for free to benefit existing scholarship and music lovers everywhere. Our new company is devoted to breaking down biases and limits of opera, enabling us to cultivate an industry where previously stifled voices can be heard.
Second Place: Christian Courage Barda, TUTTI: The Disability and Arts Advocacy Project ($1,000)“I’m honored that the Jacobs and Kelley schools are coming together to help me fight ableism in the arts.” – Christian Courage BardaTUTTI is a social justice project that advocates for disabled people in the fine arts, with an emphasis on physical disability in the performing arts. In its first stage, TUTTI will survey and interview a diverse group of disabled performing artists to collect information that will be included in a 20-minute presentation. This presentation, given by Barda, will also include a short opera scene demonstrating accessibility in opera, as well as reflections on the current and future states of physical disability within the performing arts. This presentation will be recorded and featured on a new website that host a blog with posts by a variety of disabled performing artists, as well as a concise handbook for directors and arts administrators for how to discuss accessibility with their artists. In TUTTI’s second stage, Barda will speak at diversity and inclusion arts administration conferences as an authority on navigating accessibility for artists, as well as at TEDx and similar events. In stages beyond, TUTTI will explore other types of disability (developmental, mental, etc. and other areas of the arts such as education and composition.
Asher Bennett: IU Double-Reed DayThe annual IU Double Reed Day seeks to become the premier double reed event in Indiana, providing a day of world-class reed making and performance classes and one-on-one learning to oboe and bassoon students and hobbyists. IU Double Reed Day invites IU double reed faculty, guest artists, and oboe and bassoon students to teach, mentor, and inspire other double reed players, creating and developing a regional community of interconnected double reed artists.Giovani Malcolm: Speak Up, Speak Out: Giving Voice to Activism through Art SongSpeak Up, Speak Out is a two-fold project curated for yearly performances and an ongoing database of contemporary and classical music art songs on Black activism and injustices. This project stemmed from the “Black Lives Matter” movement and the work to shed light on mass incidents of racism in American history. This project gives Black students access to the music they can materialize and easily relate to.Gus Richter: Ultrasonics for the Rest of Us
The project is the creation of a device that enables the recording and real-time monitoring of an ultrasonic signal. The user will be able to connect a microphone to the device and listen to a modified version of the audio signal. The user will also be able to mix the ultrasonic material with the non-ultrasonic material and apply layers of musical processing, such as polarity inversion and dynamic compression.Isaac Smith: Controller ConcertoThis game/concerto hybrid is designed to be a two-dimensional platformer game with a unique twist: all its musical content will be generated by the player as they interact with the game. The goal of the game will be to traverse the obstacles as quickly as possible in such a way that doing so skillfully produces a cohesive piece of music. The aim is to match the thrill of performing an instrumental concerto within an equally engaging gaming experience.Isaac Terceros: Santa Cruz Musical Arts CenterSanta Cruz is the largest and richest city of Bolivia and is the world’s 14th fastest growing city. In spite of this, the city does not have a space to host high-quality music productions and promote cultural innovation. The Santa Cruz Musical Arts Center is proposed to solve this problem. The Santa Cruz Musical Arts Center will be the nation’s largest performing arts center, as well as an architectural and cultural emblem of the city.
Other proposals included those by Adriana Torres (Art Song Through Our Voices), Corey Chang (East-West Collaboration), Haesu Choi (Mutual Audition), Gavin Craun (The Opsymatic Project), Alex Alani and Arpan Ojha (Project Oboe) and Elijah Gardner (Starlight Classic).
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