By Perry Smith SCVBJ Editor
Innovation is nothing new at California Institute of the Arts, a place as renowned for being on the vanguard as it is for producing award-winning artists.
However, a new curriculum underway there is aimed not only at cultivating the creativity to inspire technology through the arts, but also to prepare them for the challenges they’ll face as they try to bring a product to market.
Ajay Kapur, whose titles — associate dean of research and development in digital arts in the Office of the President and director of music technology — hints at the fusion of instructional discipline he’s leading at CalArts, is instructing the course along with a friend and business partner Saurabh Suri, chief investment officer and managing partner of CerraCap Ventures.
And the title for the course Kapur and Suri are teaching together is “Creative Entrepreneurship,” which seems an apt description for what they’re teaching on campus.
Kapur, a drummer and Princeton grad, learned how to combine his love of technology and music through his undergraduate and Ph.D work, evidence of which is a mechatronic drum machine with artificial intelligence that hangs suspended above his classroom in the Herb Alpert School of Music.
What they’re doing in the classroom doesn’t just have big implications for the potential to combine business and creative technology, Kapur said. It has significant implications for the future of music, as well, he said.
“We’re definitely in an age, and it’s exciting,” said Kapur, who noted that artificial intelligence has made massive gains since his undergraduate studies, and that what used to take about a year for students to model and render for algorithmic programming can now be done in about a week.
“The reason why I think artificial intelligence is important for artists to learn, is because as artists learn all these moving parts of these types of … sensors (lighting and moving parts of mechatronic systems),” he said, pointing toward some of the inventions on display in his classroom. “It gets too hard to manually go in and program each (robotic arm) — you can use AI to train a computer to do what it is, as a human, you are doing.”
Kapur said the program has been greatly supported and encouraged by Ravi Rajan, who was named president of the Valencia arts college in December 2016.
“From its founding, CalArts has been focused on being a place filled with generative energy from new and innovative ideas. Small new business ventures have great potential to be change agents in the creative sector. Creating these new entities — entrepreneurship in the arts — is something many young artists feel compelled to pursue,” Rajan said. “After creating the first graduate degree program focused on just this kind of entity creation in New York City, I’m thrilled to come to CalArts where there is a long tradition of innovation, and a great desire on the part of students and alumni to explore entity creation within the sector. Ajay’s work here has formed the basis of new and exciting work for us in the near future.”
For the professors, it’s also not just about teaching technology or actual skills, but also about preparing students for some of the challenges that a classroom education doesn’t traditionally cover.
Suri describes his role as bringing the real world experience from “the other side,” meaning the business world.
Kapur has led entrepreneurial projects from the classroom to commercial, such as Kadenze, which hosts courses from CalArts, as well as from other major institutions of higher education. The online platform brings together educators, artists and engineers from leading universities across the globe to provide a world-class education in the fields of art and creative technology. And many of its employees and executive staff are faculty and alumni of CalArts.
Suri brings his financial background, as well as the knowledge that comes with having seen “hundreds of startups.”
“It’s really the real-world experience of what it really takes to be an entrepreneur — and the pitfalls and everything else,” Suri said. “We’re also approaching it from the standpoint of, when people often say the cliche, ‘Failure is the best step to success.’ And it sounds like a really bad cliche, but we come with real-life examples of, ‘Yeah, we do this, because we’ve screwed it up several times.’”
And with the concept behind the course being fairly nascent, both Kapur and Suri have new and interesting scenarios they’ll be working through with their students.
“It’s actually a very interesting challenge — you’re approaching students who are pretty much top in their field from a creative aspect, and where they’ve spent their whole lives focusing on the creative aspect, to show them the importance of the other side.”
For more local resources for entrepreneurs:
America’s Job Center of California
No physical address
888-226-6300
workforce.lacounty.gov/accessibility
The Entrepreneurs Organization
500 Montgomery St., Suite 700, Alexandria, VA (global headquarters)
703-519-6700
www.eonetwork.org
Google Startup Grind
26336 Citrus St., Valencia, CA 91355
888-767-0767
www.startupgrind.com/santa-clarita
MakerSpace at College of the Canyons
26455 Rockwell Canyon Road, Santa Clarita, CA 91355
661-362-3408
www.canyons.edu/Offices/SchoolofAppliedTech/Pages/default.aspx
Santa Clarita Business Incubator
22704 9th Street, Santa Clarita, CA 91321
661- 290-2211
econdev.santa-clarita.com/santa-clarita-business-incubator/
Santa Clarita Economic Development Division
23920 Valencia Blvd, No. 100, Santa Clarita, CA 91355
661-255-4347
https://econdev.santa-clarita.com
Santa Clarita Valley Economic Development Center
26455 Rockwell Canyon Road, No. 263, Santa Clarita, CA 91355
661-288-4400
www.scvedc.org
Santa Clarita Valley Chamber of Commerce
28494 Westinghouse Place, No. 114, Santa Clarita, CA 91355
661-702-6977
www.scvchamber.com
Small Business Administration Office (Los Angeles District Office)
330 N. Brand Blvd., Suite 1200, Glendale, CA 91203
818-552-3201
www.sba.gov/offices/district/ca/glendale
Small Business Development Center
26455 Rockwell Canyon Road, Santa Clarita, CA 91355
661-362-5900
Canyonsecondev.org/business-units/sbdc
Steamwork Center
28368 Constellation Road, Suite 360, Santa Clarita, CA 91355
661-505-8597
Steamwork.Center
