TEDxEast - Tyler Cowen - The Great Stagnation

http://www.tedxeast.com/

Tyler Cowen shows us through economics that we may not be as innovative as we think we are and urges us to change.

WICI Seminar: Is our Concept of Moral Responsibility Newtonian? with Karen Houle

Is our Concept of Moral Responsibility Newtonian? - Karen Houle from http://vimeo.com/user2485691 on Vimeo.

"Is our Concept of Moral Responsibility Newtonian?" Briefly, I argue that while we have come to appreciate that certain issues facing us today are genuinely complex, not merely complicated, we therefore need to build and mobilize interventions, whether epidemiological, architectural or economic, which are themselves sufficiently informed by complexity and thus, able to "meet" their intended objects of concern. We have not put as much time and effort into rethinking the basic concepts with which we try to make normative judgments and recommendations in and around those same complex issues. The conceptual landscape of moral philosophy is oddly Newtonian. This is especially true in the case of climate change and collective responsibility. I discuss what features a concept of responsibility adequate to complex issues need to have.

Speaker Profile
Karen L. F. Houle is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Guelph, specializing in ethics and in social & political philosophy. Author of articles on philosophical figures: Foucault, Spinoza, Deleuze & Guattari, Derrida, Butler & Irigaray; and topics: friendship, animal perception, abortion, surrogacy, intellectual property, feminism and ownership, politics and pedagogy, and standpoint epistemology. She is also a member of the Canadian "Community of Practice in Ecosystem Approaches to Health", and a nationally-recognized published poet: Ballast (House of Anansi Press, 2001); and During (Gaspereau Press, 2008).
http://sig.uwaterloo.ca/

  Social Innovation and Resilience: A Complexity Approach to Change and Transformation - Frances Westley

Part of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation seminars. This talks was held in the Burgundy Room of the University Club at the University of Waterloo, February 10, 2009.
The Waterloo Applied Complexity and Innovation Seminars began in Fall 2008. Hosted by SiG@Waterloo, it is the first phase in the development of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity & Innovation (WICI). Both the seminar series and WICI will integrate knowledge from the University’s faculties, departments, centres and schools to address the most pressing problems of the 21st century.

WICI is being created to facilitate transdisciplinary, collaborative research focused on promoting innovation and resilience within the complex adaptive systems at the core of human well being in the 21st century. In the coming decades, rapid systemic change on multiple levels will contribute to global problems, potentially inducing pandemics, violent meteorological events, and social and political unrest. The weakening of national public institutions, widening gaps between rich and poor, increasing scarcity of high-quality energy, and worsening damage to the global environment coupled with increased global connectivity will erode systemic resilience and boost the incidence of surprising and even catastrophic change.

The goals of the Institute are to:

• Develop a common, transdisciplinary language and methodology and an integrated, coherent theory for the study and pedagogy of complex adaptive systems; and,

• Apply these tools to stimulate rapid and beneficial innovation that will increase the resilience of complex adaptive systems worldwide – including social, political, economic, and ecological systems – that are currently under threat.

By creating a forum and providing a common language to facilitate rigorous multidisciplinary discussion, WICI is intended to attract leading researchers in applied complexity and put UW at the forefront of efforts to understand and address multi-scale, systems level problems.

Please click here to find out more information regarding the WICI seminars.

Seminar with Frances Westley - Stockholm Resilience Centre

Seminar November 2009: Using resilience theory to frame research on social innovation.

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Seminar Frances Westley
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This seminar focuses predominantly on the social side of linked social-ecological systems.

Frances Westley is a member of the Stockholm Resilience Centre board. She is a renowned scholar and consultant in the areas of social innovation, strategies for sustainable development, middle management and strategic change, visionary leadership and inter-organizational collaboration.

She serves on numerous advisory boards including Resilience Alliance Board of Science, Emery University School of Ecology, World Conservation Union-Conservation Breeding Specialist Group, the Canadian Biodiversity Institute, the Bedford Institute of Oceanography, the Stockholm Resilience Center, the SARAS Institute and Evergreen Canada.

She is on the editorial board of several journals, including Journal of Applied Behavioral Science and Ecology and Society. She is the recipient of several awards including the Ulysses S. Seal award for innovation in conservation, and the Corporate Knights Award.
http://www.sig.uwaterloo.ca/

What is social innovation?

Dr. Frances Westley, J.W. McConnell Chair in Social Innovation at the University of Waterloo, SiG@Waterloo, presents a framework for understanding social innovation. Dr. Westley is also the author of the groundbreaking book, “Getting to Maybe”.

A practical, inspirational, revolutionary guide to social innovation

Many of us have a deep desire to make the world around us a better place. But often our good intentions are undermined by the fear that we are so insignificant in the big scheme of things that nothing we can do will actually help feed the world’s hungry, fix the damage of a Hurricane Katrina or even get a healthy lunch program up and running in the local school. We tend to think that great social change is the province of heroes – an intimidating view of reality that keeps ordinary people on the couch. But extraordinary leaders such as Gandhi and even unlikely social activists such as Bob Geldof most often see themselves as harnessing the forces around them, rather than singlehandedly setting those forces in motion. The trick in any great social project – from the global fight against AIDS to working to eradicate poverty in a single Canadian city – is to stop looking at the discrete elements and start trying to understand the complex relationships between them. By studying fascinating real-life examples of social change through this systems-and-relationships lens, the authors of Getting to Maybe tease out the rules of engagement between volunteers, leaders, organizations and circumstance – between individuals and what Shakespeare called “the tide in the affairs of men.”

Getting to Maybe applies the insights of complexity theory and harvests the experiences of a wide range of people and organizations – including the ministers behind the Boston Miracle (and its aftermath); the Grameen Bank, in which one man’s dream of micro-credit sparked a financial revolution for the world’s poor; the efforts of a Canadian clothing designer to help transform the lives of aboriginal women and children; and many more – to lay out a brand new way of thinking about making change in communities, in business, and in the world.

Consuming Culture and Greed

Education for Citizenship Series: Aurora Forum

Presented with the Stanford Center for Ethics in Society

This installment in our Education for Citizenship series on virtues and vices examines greed, a selfish and excessive desire for more than is needed. How much is enough? What enables advertisers to convince citizens to consume more than is reasonable? Are seductive images of comfort, convenience, and sexual stimulation that bombard us in advertising edging out non-market values of care, community, love, and public service? Are market values changing college campuses? Join us for a conversation that casts a critical eye on the effects of greed on individual and collective life.

DAVID LOY, Besl Professor of Ethics, Religion and Society, Xavier University

Buddhist philosopher David Loy recently moved from the faculty of International Studies at Bunkyo University in Japan to Xavier University in Ohio. His 1997 article, “The Religion of the Market,” sparked an ongoing discussion about the nature of consumer capitalism which, he claims, is “the first truly world religion, binding all corners of the globe more and more tightly into a worldview and set of values whose religious role we overlook only because we insist upon seeing them as ‘secular.’” His books include A Buddhist History of the West, Lack and Transcendence, The Great Awakening: A Buddhist Social Theory, and Money, Sex, War, Karma: Notes for a Buddhist Revolution.

http://www.xavier.edu/ers/endowed-chair.cfm

http://home.arcor.de/mb.schiekel/loybib.htm

JULIET SCHOR, Chair and Professor of Sociology, Boston College

Juliet Schor’s research over the last ten years has focused on issues pertaining to trends in work and leisure, consumerism, the relationship between work and family, and economic justice. Her most recent book is Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture. This book is an account of marketing to children from inside the advertising agencies and an assessment of how these activities are affecting children. She is also the author of the national bestsellers, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, The Overspent American: Why we Want What We Don’t Need, and Do Americans Shop Too Much? She was appointed a Guggenheim Fellow for her work on consumer society, and in 2006 she won the Leontief Prize for contributions to expanding the frontiers of economic thought.

http://www2.bc.edu/~schorj/

MARK GONNERMAN (moderator) is director of the Aurora Forum

Social Innovation & Resilience:

A Complexity Approach to Change and Transformation

Lecture Presentation Slides (.pdf)

Frances Westley joined the University of Waterloo as the JW McConnell Chair in Social Innovation in July 2007. In this role she will head up a Canada wide initiative in social innovation, SiG (Social Innovation Generation), a cross sectoral partnership to build capacity for social innovation in Canada funded by the J.W McConnell Family Foundation, University of Waterloo and the Ontario government. Dr. Westley is a renowned scholar and consultant in the areas of social innovation, strategies for sustainable development, middle management and strategic change, visionary leadership and inter-organizational collaboration. Her most recent book, Getting to Maybe (Random House, 2006) focuses the dynamics of social innovation, and institutional entrepreneurship in complex adaptive systems. Experiments in Consilience (Island Press, 2004), focuses on the dynamics of inter-organizational and interdisciplinary collaboration in the management of ecological and conservation problems.

Waterloo Applied Complexity and Innovation Seminars

Social Innovation

Definition

Social innovation is an initiative, product or process or program that profoundly changes the basic routines, resource and authority flows or beliefs of any social system. Successful social innovations have durability and broad impact. While social innovation has recognizable stages and phases, achieving durability and scale is a dynamic process that requires both emergence of opportunity and deliberate agency, and a connection between the two. The capacity of any society to create a steady flow of social innovations, particularly those which re-engage vulnerable populations, is an important contributor to the overall social and ecological resilience.

The concept is founded on the following assumptions:

• The need for social innovation is obvious and compelling. The opportunity for social innovation is less obvious, but, equally compelling.


• Social problems are, by nature, complex problems- social innovators work in complex systems.


• Social innovation requires collaborative enterprise; the social sector, public sector and private sector must work together to create transformative change.


• Social innovation requires new forms of knowledge production, combining knowledge from multiple disciplines and from both theory and practice to reframe and solve problems.

Waterloo Applied Complexity and Innovation Seminars

The focus of the WICI Seminar Series is to bring together students and researchers from across the University of Waterloo who are interested in understanding the complex processes that will be central to human well being in the 21st century.

George Francis - World and Other Systems: A Challenge to WICI

Lee Smolin - Symmetries in Economic Models and their Consequences

Matthew Hoffman - Governance Avalanches: A Self-Organized Criticality Perspective on Innovation in Global Governance

Frances Westley - Social Innovation & Resilience: A Complexity Approach to Change and Transformation

Keith Hipel - Trade vs. the Environment: Strategic Settlement from a Systems Engineering Perspective

Thomas Homer-Dixon - Ingenuity Theory: Adaptation Failure and Societal Crisis