Retreat Brings "A-ha!" Moments for Innovation Lab Teams

The Innovation Lab grantees took some “island time” to develop shared strategies before moving ahead to the prototyping process.

Northrop, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Redmoon, and The Theater Offensive each spent a five-day retreat with their teams in the Innovation Lab for the Performing Arts.

The four grantee organizations in EmcArts’s Innovation Lab for the Performing Arts Round 8 Program — Northrop at University of Minnesota, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Redmoon, and The Theater Offensive — recently spent five days in a focused retreat at the Airlie Center in Virginia. This intensive “island time” provided each organization with the opportunity to step away from the day-to-day life of their organizations to work as a team on shared strategies and goals for the projects they will prototype throughout the Innovation Lab process.

We checked in with each organization before the retreat to learn about the biggest question their organization was wrestling with before diving into their focused retreat. Now that they’ve each returned from the Airlie Center, we asked each team:

What is one major “a-ha!” moment your team experienced during the retreat — and how will it influence how you move forward?

Read the responses from the four Innovation Lab teams:

We’ll hear from each Innovation Lab team again in the fall, when they’ll post an update about what’s going on in each of their prototyping processes. Stay tuned!