Innovation Workshop

The Innovation Workshop, led by Victoria Ma and Dennis West from the Organizing Innovation Network, welcomed innovators from policy, start-up entrepreneurship, civil society, industry, graduate students and early career researchers.

Innovation Workshop report

By Claire Weil, speakers’ manager, Human Welfare Conference 2019

During the Human Welfare Conference, Victoria Ma and Dennis West from the Organizing Innovation Network facilitated a practical lunch-time workshop on the technical process of collaboratively developing innovations for positive and effective social impact. Participants to the workshop were assigned the role of “researcher” or “innovator” and asked to generate questions for one another in order to optimize the interaction. Through mapping, grouping, and categorizing, each team composed of innovators and researchers were able to come up with a roadmap to achieve efficient cooperation in order to generate an action plan to tackle difficult societal issues together.

This hands-on activity was a refreshing session quite different from the talks of the conference. The participatory and collaborative activity was important in providing us with knowledge of how to connect innovators possessing technical capacity and means to achieve change with researchers who hold the understanding of evidence-base for meaningful social impact. The workshop was dynamic and pushed participants of the conference to actively apply their expertise and skills to tackling the practical issue of working together for purposeful innovation.

Pictures from the workshop (taken by Nuno Pereira)