Symposium 2009 - Workgroups Description

Innovations in Intercultural Exchange

The joys and the calamities that occur as a consequence of cultures being brought together through exploration, travel, education, commerce, and migration have spurned many innovations in intercultural exchanges.

A great example of an innovation in intercultural exchange is the Fulbright Program,  created from the ashes of World War II to promote peace through increased "mutual understanding between...people...through the exchange of persons, knowledge, and skills."  On a different scale, Bill Melton envisioned that from the marriage of the Internet and face-to-face exchange among talented young people..."new social forms would arise benefiting both the individuals involved and the world." Another innovation is the non-profit organization, Seeds of Peace [www.seedsofpeace.org/], which takes children of peoples in conflict, such as Isreali and Palestinian kids, to summer camps to forge bonds in neutral environments that help humanize "the other" for when they grow up to take the reins of society.

Business Innovation

The saying “change is the only constant” has never been more true than today when considering the global economy. Thus “Innovation” is the newest corporate mantra, usually warranted, but sometimes just a buzzword. Nevertheless, the roller-coaster global market drives innovation as businesses seek to create new markets or avoid  oblivion.  These business innovations take various forms, from new-product invention to re engineered supply changes. 

Lets consider an example of business innovation: The Tata group of companies that launched TATA NANO, [www.tatanano.com/] the world's cheapest car, opened their car assembly operation to entrepreneurs across India. Tata Motors would train the people, would oversee their quality assurance and those entrepreneurs would become satellite assembly operations for the company. So, in turn they would create entrepreneurs across the country who would produce the car as well as cater to remote rural customers of the Nano car.  Innovations can also occur in management processes, whether it's the original Ford assembly line of the early 1900s to, more recently,  Jeff Bezos who tapped the nascent World Wide Web to pioneer the move from bricks and mortars retailing to e-commerce. 

Energy Innovation

It is a challenge to discover and develop alternate sources of energy that can meet the ever increasing for efficient, economic, and environmentally friendly sources of energy.  Today's world literally runs on a diminishing supply of fossil fuels.  At the same time, we have to deal with global warming and other environmental side effects of these conventional forms of energy resources that threaten the safety of our planet. 

These challenges are creating incentives for the science, business, and government communities to innovate as they search to create viable  alternate sources of energy such as in solar, wind, tidal, biomass and geothermal energies. One company, Freeplay [http://www.freeplayenergy.com/], an energy company based in South Africa has launched solar-powered lanterns that are beginning to light up poor communities in the developing world which are still reliant on toxic and polluting kerosene lanterns. This is just one of the many such innovations happening in this field the world over from small to industrial scales.

Internet Innovations

The Internet itself was an innovation. Then, when its digital protocol created by the US Defense Department got re-deployed for academic and then commercial purposes, the Internet spawned --and continues to spawn-- innovations in practically all walks of life and parts of the world.

Take for example, Tim Berners-Lee, who developed HTML,  which gave birth to World Wide Web. Taking it one step higher were Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia, founders of Hotmail, who created the first web based email client. And innovations continue to explode with Google indexing the entire network and making search as a feature at a scale that would have never been imagined by the US DoD. Whereas older search engines like Altavista used the concept of frequency of occurrence of the search query, Google's innovation was the ranking of search results using the inter-relationship between websites.

Innovations in the Fine Arts

Paradoxically the arts are both a venue of artistic expression and a rigid environment where dogma dictates what is “art” and what is not.  However occasionally an artist or group of artists come along to smash convention by using innovative new forms or techniques. 

One great example of artistic innovation is found in the French impressionists who broke all the rules:  they carried their brushes, palates, and easels out of the studio and into the cities and countryside; instead of replicating what they saw, they played with light and color to create vivid effects. When painters like Monet, Cezanne, and Renoir started producing their paintings in the mid 1800’s they were ridiculed as sloppy amateurs by the Paris art establishment. But by the end of that century the impressionists had taken it over.

We can take another example from India:  Nrityagram the “dance village,”[ http://www.nrityagram.org/] which for the first time merged various dance forms from throughout India under one roof, and combined them with contemporary concepts  for impact in India and around the world.  Called “cutting edge” in a recent Washington Post review, Nrityagram has redefined people’s perception of classical Indian dance.

What other artists,  who were not only great painters, sculptors, choreographers, dramatists, or musicians but also innovators,  redefined or reinvented their art form?  How did the art world respond to their innovations at the time?  Did the artist achieve widespread acceptance in his or her lifetime? 

Innovations in Entertainment

As the global entertainment market has surged, the innovations driven by this growth are inevitable. Television, one of the mainstays of entertainment,  has been pushed to continuously adapt to a rapidly growing and changing audience. This growth and diversification in turn is driving innovations in television programming, such as with "Reality Television" which has revolutionised the concept of plot and script in television. 

Entertainment also been increasingly leveraged to promote social causes. Innovations such as the first Live Aid concert in 1985 opened the door for others to carry out awareness campaigns through entertainment. 

Social Innovation

Social innovation refers to new strategies, organizational models, programs, and institutions that meet social needs of all kinds -from working conditions and education to community development and health - and that extend and strengthen civil society.

Governments are increasingly recognizing that innovation isn't just about Science and Technology; innovation is just as much about better prisons, healthcare, schooling and governance. Not all social innovations are non-profit; some have innovated by having a "double-bottom line" of profit and social impact, like Specialisterne, a software-testing company that employs previously unemployable autistic people who have proven themselves more capable software testers than traditional IT personnel. Others, like KickStart, invented a radically new foot pump for irrigation that rural poor farmers in Kenya have used to transition from subsistence to small-scale commercial farming.

Innovations in Education

Recent innovations in education are finally removing the stranglehold on so-called "learning" imposed by an obscolete model created over a thousand years ago.  This authoritarian factory model dispenses standardized “information” to pupils who memorize and repeat it in exams, retaining little in the way of practical knowledge,  critical thinking, or intellectual curiosity.  We are now seeing increasing experimentation with innovative new pedagogical models such as learning-by-doing, problem-based learning, case teaching, distributed learning, interdisciplinarity, collaborative learning and team teaching.  Most of these models require that teachers give  up their traditional role as the all-knowing “sage on the stage” to become a “guide on the side” to the more empowered and independent learners required for the 21st Century.