In music making “in company”, the protagonists have to follow the rules of interaction and create the cohesion of “being together”. At the same time, they try to promote personal goals that depend on specific personal treasure troves of experience. These are continuously being modified also as a result of the exchange between individuals. The perspective of the “individuals in company” leads the emphasis of the investigations to the ways in which the acts of performance, interpretation and local discourse give shape to creative processes in multipart music making and to the definition of the individual, collective and collaborative dimensions in this context. Focusing on the “creators” rather than on the “produced object”, the studies included in this volume explore the diversity of the roles, powers, symbolism, meanings and values given to the “polyphony of voices” in secular and religious traditions based on extensive fieldwork experience. The contributors to this volume also consider the UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage List in this context, as well as the role of local, national and international awards. By understanding “culture as a drug”, whose absorption is realised within interacting cells, culture appears as a cellular network and music as quite an efficient device for its functioning.

Extensive research conducted by the Hasso Plattner Design Thinking Research Program at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, USA, and the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, has yielded valuable insights on why and how design thinking works. The participating researchers have identified metrics, developed models, and conducted studies, which are featured in this book, and in the previous volumes of this series. This volume provides readers with tools to bridge the gap between research and practice in design thinking with varied real world examples. Several different approaches to design thinking are presented in this volume. Acquired frameworks are leveraged to understand design thinking team dynamics. The contributing authors lead the reader through new approaches and application fields and show that design thinking can tap the potential of digital technologies in a human-centered way. In a final section, new ideas in neurodesign at Stanford University and at Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam are elaborated upon thereby challenging the reader to consider newly developed methodologies and provide discussion of how these insights can be applied to various sectors. Special emphasis is placed on understanding the mechanisms underlying design thinking at the individual and team levels. Design thinking can be learned. It has a methodology that can be observed across multiple settings and accordingly, the reader can adopt new frameworks to modify and update existing practice. The research outcomes compiled in this book are intended to inform and provide inspiration for all those seeking to drive innovation – be they experienced design thinkers or newcomers.

This volume features excellent new research devoted to advancing our understanding of how networks foster creativity, innovation and the development of cutting-edge technologies. This is crucial reading for any researchers exploring strategic management tools and techniques, and specifically the intricacies of "network theory" within businesses.

Drawing on Australian and comparative case studies, this volume reconceptualises non-metropolitan creative economies through the ‘qualities of place’. This book examines the agricultural and gastronomic cultures surrounding ‘native’ foods, coastal sculpture festivals, universities and regional communities, wine in regional Australia and Canada, the creative systems of the Hunter Valley, musicians in ‘outback’ settings, Fab Labs as alternatives to clusters, cinema and the cultivation of ‘authentic’ landscapes, and tensions between the ‘representational’ and ‘non-representational’ in the cultural economies of the Blue Mountains. What emerges is a picture of rural and regional places as more than the ‘other’ of metropolitan creative cities. Place itself is shown to embody affordances, unique institutional structures and the invisible threads that ‘hold communities together’. If, in the wake of the publication of Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class, creative industries models tended to emphasize ‘big cities’ and the spatial-cum-cultural imaginaries of the ‘Global North’, recent research and policy discourses – especially, in the Australian context – have paid greater attention to ‘small cities’, rural and remote creativity. This collection will be of interest to scholars, students and practitioners in creative industries, urban and regional studies, sociology, geography and cultural planning.

Axel Müller-Hofvenschiöld presents a new evaluation approach for executive education. His Strategic Tool for Evaluating Educational Returns (STEER) combines ideas from controlling and psychology in order to measure the added-value of face-to-face business school programs to an organisation.

This volume addresses key issues and assumptions about creativity as a potential discipline, making the progress of creativity studies more explicit and communicable to those within and outside of the field.

How can the ‘where’ of creativity help us examine how and why it has become a paradigmatic concept in contemporary economies and societies? Adopting a geographically diverse, theoretically rigorous approach, the Handbook offers a cutting-edge study of creativity as it has emerged in policy, academic, activist, and cultural discourse over the last two decades. To this end, the volume departs from conventional modes of analyzing creativity (by industry, region, or sector) and instead identifies key themes that thread through shifting contexts of the creative in the arts, media, technology, education, governance, and development. By tracing the myriad spatialities of creativity, the chapters map its inherently paradoxical features: reinforcing persistent conditions of inequality even as it opens avenues for imagining and enacting more equitable futures.