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NYC Cultural Innovation Lab
Harrison Lee leading a workshop at a whiteboard covered in sticky notes while participants listen and take notes.

About us

Experts in innovation, IP and business models, building for-profit infrastructure inside nonprofit arts organizations.

Our mandate is economic sustainability in the arts.

Director

Harrison Lee

Harrison has spent over a decade building financial and growth tools for the creative economy, from crowdfunding mechanisms to audience optimization and alternative capital structures. He has advised more than 100 artists and arts organizations, from regional theaters to Grammy-winning musicians and Shontelle (“Impossible”), on growing revenue, building audiences and becoming sustainable. He currently serves as Entrepreneur in Residence at the Cultural Innovation Lab at Yale.

A writer and producer himself, Harrison has developed four sold-out musical showcases, was a finalist for the Rhinebeck Writers Retreat, NAAP and Prospect Theater Company, and is partnering with Sacred Heart University and the IFS Foundation to bring his musical into schools.

HBA, Ivey Business School · MFA, NYU Tisch School of the Arts

Our partners

A partner for each area of work, each with experience doing this work inside institutions and across industries.

01

R&D Labs

The infrastructure and innovation rigor to test ideas with real audiences and turn the results into practices the whole field can use.

Partner, R&D Labs

Daniel Gomez Seidel

Innovation and service design

Daniel builds innovation capability inside large institutions. At Capital One he co-built the bank’s R&D Lab and trained more than 400 executives in design thinking. He has led service design and agile transformation programs for the World Bank and the United Nations, co-founded the innovation agency in-plural with StrawberryFrog, and mentors at the New Museum’s NEW INC.

02

IP Commercialization

Test, package and license the developed IP already in your vault, building a for-profit layer within your nonprofit’s mission.

Partners, IP Commercialization

To be announced

  • A development executive who has worked with studios and knows how to find and package scripts for what they buy
  • A leader who has built technology transfer offices at universities
  • An entertainment lawyer who has set up both for-profit and nonprofit entities

03

Accelerator & Venture Funds

Take artists and theaters through an accelerator that grows the IP and gives it the best chance to earn revenue.

Partner, Accelerator & Venture Funds

MOC Innovations

Frances Pollock, Founder · Director, Cultural Innovation Lab at Yale

MOC Innovations has spent more than five years building arts accelerators, including the model behind the Cultural Innovation Lab at Yale, which works with Connecticut theaters and performing arts centers. They bring a cohort-based curriculum, a proven acceleration model and legal IP structures that keep artists in control of their work, and now bring that model to New York.

A cyanotype print of a workshop: a facilitator talks the room through a case study, with a board of sticky notes beside him and a slide on the screen behind.

Advisory council

  • Emil Kang

    Cultural strategy and philanthropy

    Emil is the former Program Director for Arts and Culture at the Mellon Foundation, where he oversaw a $120 million annual grantmaking portfolio and launched Creatives Rebuild New York. He served as a presidential appointee to the National Council on the Arts.

  • Jenny Waxman

    Entertainment law and intellectual property

    Jenny is the founder of Waxman Legal, whose clients include Tony Award-winning Broadway producers and film and TV producers who have worked with HBO and Apple TV. She built entertainment practices at Reed Smith and Jayaram Law and is writing the latest Theater section of the Entertainment Industry Contracts legal reference.

  • Neil Redding

    Leadership and new business models

    Neil advises leadership teams on building new business models as technology changes their markets, and teaches executives at Duke Corporate Education. He has spent more than 30 years leading innovation teams, including at Gensler.

  • Mariah Rankine-Landers

    Cultural systems and learning design

    A researcher at the Stanford Center for Neurodiversity and Human Potential, Mariah brings more than 20 years of experience designing cultural systems and arts learning. She received the National Guild for Community Arts Education’s Sandra Bowie Social Change Award.

  • Lauren Peters Lague

    Brand and market strategy

    Lauren was Chief Marketing Officer of Black Girls Code and spent 11 years as a brand leader at Salesforce, where she launched the Salesforce Designer career path. She chairs the board of Catapult Design and holds an MS in Branding from the VCU Brandcenter.

  • Darko Lovric

    Organizational design

    A former World Economic Forum fellow and Deloitte transformation consultant, Darko is an organizational psychologist working at the intersection of corporate innovation and venture building. He is a regular contributor to Harvard Business Review.

  • Teddy Zmrhal

    Design and scaled innovation

    Formerly Global VP of Design and Innovation at Salesforce, Teddy has scaled innovation practices at IDEO and taught at the Stanford d.school. He advises institutions on testing, validating and scaling new initiatives.

  • Wayne Sutier Matamoros

    Strategic experimentation

    Wayne teaches at NYU and mentors through the NYU AI Innovation Accelerator Program. He brings more than 15 years of design, experimentation and strategy work across the public and private sectors, most recently as a Chief Strategy Officer.

  • Hannah Kloepfer

    Film and TV development

    Hannah is Director of Development at Lucky Boy Productions, a New York TV and film company, and has worked on development for Academy Award nominees on projects at Amazon and Sony Pictures. She co-wrote the youth musical Pitch In with Tony nominee Taylor Louderman, taking it from workshops to productions in schools across the country.

Common questions

Let’s talk

Tell us about your organization and what you want to explore. We’ll follow up to set a time to talk.

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