Creating Innovative Communities - with Dr Sean Geobey
Our communities face a wide variety of wicked challenges such as encouraging sustainable economic development, engaging in Indigenous reconciliation, and enabling a local environment for human flourishing. In this talk we will discuss what it takes to build a community that has the capacity for innovation, including tools that you can use as a student, educator, and citizen to help build the innovative community you want to be a part of.
Sean Geobey brings applied expertise in social innovation theory, sustainable finance, planning, governance, and decision-theory to his research and teaching. As Director of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation (WICI - https://uwaterloo.ca/complexity-innovation/) and Co-Director of the Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation and Resilience (WISIR - https://uwaterloo.ca/waterloo-institute-for-social-innovation-and-resilience/) his teaching includes cutting edge work in social entrepreneurship and social innovation, with a pedagogical approach that uses problem-based, community-engaged learning. His work uses complex adaptive systems theory and community-based research to explore governance and design issues in collective action, often using large-scale co-design processes such as social innovation labs. Much of this work has been in the social finance sector, where he has led the Legacy Leadership Lab (https://uwaterloo.ca/legacy-leadership-lab/legacy-leadership-lab-cultivating-social-acquisition) and the systems mapping and principles focused evaluation of the Canadian Social Finance Fund’s Investment Readiness Program (https://uwaterloo.ca/waterloo-institute-for-social-innovation-and-resilience/projects/investment-readiness-program-20). He has been a Fellow at the Filene Research Institute and is currently Social Capital Partners Fellow at the Rutgers Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing.
This seminar is open to the public: all undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, staff, visitors are welcome to attend. If you are a prospective high school student and would like to attend this seminar, please contact ki@uwaterloo.ca to plan your visit!