Academy Arts

Abstract

The term “Academy Arts” was used to describe the presentation of art and poetry at the Academy of Management (AOM) meeting. Here I describe the evolution of Academy Arts from a suggestion for a “village square” made by a committee in 1995 through its birth at the AOM meeting in 2000 and its death after the 2005 AOM meeting. I also describe several learnings from the experience that have implications for others interested in the implementation of novel ideas. These include how an initial idea and the rationale for it evolve over time, exhilaration when one's idea becomes real, how easy it is to be too attached to the idea, how ideas need appropriate structures to develop, and how the original impetus for an idea can be organizationally forgotten over time, and thus an innovation may be assessed based on criteria that are very different from the original purpose.