Innovating Our Way to a Resilient and Sustainable Future

In the last 300 years human activity has upset the delicate balance of our planet. Despite the fact that we have resources and technical know how to positively affect mounting environmental challenges, real change in these domains remains frustratingly slow. What are the barriers? Do we need political and economic reform to slow down both the consumption of energy and the release of carbon? Can new technologies and clean energy change the equation? What about innovations in agriculture, food distribution and even food consumption? Can means be found to build local markets in our increasingly global society? How can urban sustainability efforts be moved from the margins to be more central to how our cities and towns are run?

The next offering of the Graduate Diploma in Social Innovation, with support from the J. W. McConnell Family Foundation, will be grounded in the domains of food systems, green technologies and urban sustainability. The challenges related to these groups are complex and can feel intractable even to those most passionate about finding solutions.

The problems are too complex for any one sector – government, business, or community organizations – to solve on their own. Creating shared value in these domains involves working to reimagine how all three sectors can interact to create both social and economic value in pursuit of new, more creative and more promising opportunities for change.

Theme Areas for the 2012 Session:

Food Systems, Green Technologies, Urban Sustainability.

Human industrialization and related activity has not been kind to our planet. According to the IPPC, present CO2 concentrations are 35% higher than at any time in the last 650,000 years. These growing concentrations threaten biodiversity and with it the very source of our sustenance: sustainable food production for a rapidly expanding global population.

Confronted with over-harvesting, widespread land degradation and the toll of increased urbanization, we face a future in which food supplies in many parts of the world will not be secure and all life-sustaining environmental systems struggle under increased stress and strain. Unless carbon concentrations are better managed, unless renewable energy gains a much-increased foothold, and unless the human footprint on our planet is lightened, global warming seems sure to affect our capacity to feed ourselves and sustain our economies. These issues are all tightly interrelated in overlapping complex systems. To get traction on such intractable problems, new approaches and new thinking is clearly required – and transformative solutions will demand engagement from all corners and all sectors, with people and organizations acting in their own interests and in the interests of the communities that sustain them.

Those interested in finding breakthrough innovations and exploring how those can be scaled to create real changes in our approach to the linked challenges of carbon management, rising urbanization and food security are encouraged to apply to this program. Through research and applying cutting edge frameworks and design thinking, participants will work to map the interconnections that create these negative cycles, identify the most promising innovations, and develop strategies to broaden and deepen their impact.