Even Stanford’s new passion for the arts has to do with hatching better products and apps. From an Economist article about the university/tech incubator attempting to create Hewletts and Packards who are also Hockneys and Picassos:

“California’s famous innovation factory, which counts Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google, Reed Hastings of Netflix, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger of Instagram, and Peter Thiel of PayPal among its alumni, has discovered that arts are the future. ‘Stanford is aware that it’s educating leaders,’ explains Stephen Hinton, a professor of music and the director of the Stanford Arts Initiative. ‘And leadership isn’t just about having technical skills and economic savvy, but about having a broad range of skills.’

In other words, Stanford wants its future Brins and Pages to know not just how to code but also how to decode Mozart symphonies. From last September, all undergraduates have had to take a compulsory class in ‘Creative Expression’. Among the 161 courses they can choose from are Laptop Orchestra and Shakespeare in Performance.

The Palo Alto-based university is trying to help answer one of the questions that haunts our ‘knowledge society’: where will new ideas come from?”