Contact Information
sean.geobey@uwaterloo.ca
EV3 4259
Twitter: @sgeobey
LinkedIn: Sean Geobey's LinkedIn
Sean Geobey brings applied expertise in social innovation, sustainable finance, and decision-theory to his research and teaching. As Director of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation (WICI - https://uwaterloo.ca/complexity-innovation/) 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 and participatory budgeting processes. He has been a Fellow at the Filene Research Institute (https://www.filene.org/), Social Capital Partners Fellow at the Rutgers Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing (https://smlr.rutgers.edu/faculty-research-engagement/institute-study-employee-ownership-and-profit-sharing), and a Research Fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Finance (https://smith.queensu.ca/centres/isf/index.php).
He is the Co-Founder of Groupthink Labs, a research & development social enterprise focused on collective intelligence (https://groupthinklabs.com/).
Courses Taught
- ENBUS 612 – Social Entrepreneurship and Scaling Social Innovation
- ECDEV 605 – Entrepreneurship and Sustainable Small Business Development
Selected Publications
- Geobey, S. (2024). A framework for shifting away from capital-focused measures of success. In The Routledge Handbook of Cooperative Economics and Management (pp. 120-130). Routledge.https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003449850-11/framework-shifting-away-capital-focused-measures-success-sean-geobey?context=ubx&refId=795bd2ba-c801-49db-a688-3c1b10aa75d2
- Geobey, S., Campbell, S., & Kearney, N. (2023). Testing participatory budgeting voting design: Two cases from the city of Kitchener. Local Development & Society, 1-20. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/26883597.2023.2227359
- Campbell, T., Geobey, S., & Ronson, M. (2021). The Legacy Leadership Lab: Cultivating the social acquisition movement. Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation and Resilience. https://uwaterloo.ca/legacy-leadership-lab/legacy-leadership-lab-cultivating-social-acquisition
- Geobey, S., and K. A. McGowan. 2019. Panarchy, ontological and epistemological phenomena, and the Plague. Ecology and Society 24(4):23.
https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-11089-240423 - Geobey, S., & Callahan, J. (2017). Managing Impact Portfolios: A Conceptual View of Scale. ACRN Oxford Journal of Finance and Risk Perspectives, 6(4), 17-36.
Degrees
- Ph.D - Environment and Resource Studies, University of Waterloo, 2014
- M.A. - Economics, Queen’s University, 2005
- BA (Hons.) - Economics & Political Science, Wilfrid Laurier University, 2003