East Cleveland Theater's current production of "The Wiz" is an abolute delight and great family entertainment, as the story and song will appeal to audiences from nine to ninety.  

Now playing weekends (Friday and Saturday evenings and Sunday matinee) thru May 21, 2006, "The Wiz" is a great Mother's Day gift idea as the cast showcases wonderful talent living in our midst. 

Zsolt Bognar was at once extraordinary and authentic in his performance Wednesday night of Tchaikovsky's 2nd Piano Concerto at Kulas Hall, on the Cleveland  Institute of Music campus.  Bognar, a student of Sergei Babayan, was passionate in his interpretation of the rarely heard concerto in G Major.  His keyboard fingering provided an awesome display of his growing physical and mental virtuosity. 

Gift giving can take many manifestations, tangible and intantible. The most valuable are sometimes less obvious.  Children, for example, revel in things in which they can participate and activity can assume many guises.  Advertising pushes products or activities but what about unpromoted activites?  The internet offers both small and large entrepreneurs a level playing field by enabling them equal access to consumers.  Thus the internet becomes the zone for entrepreneurs and participation.  Search engines connect everyone to everything, creating great opportunity.  Think how this changes the way children and their parents "shop."  Two things are true: It will never be the same but how and what we "shop" for is still being defined as an extension of the old ways.  Consider this, the early auto-mobiles' design were simply motor-powered carriages.  The same holds for innovation today:  the great spurt in innovation is yet to come, and its arrival will be hastened as more people participate on the internet.  Search engines enable people to leverage their intellectual property by lowering the barriers to consumers' access to products and services.

Gift giving is the most widespread manifestation of the holiday season. The eternal question: What to give Johnny or Jane?  Mass merchandisers work hard at creating push for their products.  Tie-ins between movies and products, co-branding sports figures and products are examples of the sometimes creative approaches used.  What's too frequently missing from the mix are artisans' works sold through channels that don't promote themselves like mass merchandisers do. 

The Nature - Nurture debate Harvard's Steven Pinker weighed in on as Case's first Distinguished Lecturer last month, has rich meaning for innovation and entrepreneurship:  Comparisions between NEO and California's Bay Area are illustrative.