Archive for November, 2013

Strategic Foresight for North-East Paris

Monday, November 25th, 2013

The town of Aulnay-sous-Bois in the north-eastern suburb of Paris, France, has signed a 3-year partnership agreement with l’École des Ponts ParisTech one of the most prestigious and selective French “Grandes Écoles”. The partnership, which extends until 2016, aims at defining the “territorial development” of the town and helping the town articulate its Master  Plan 2030.

The first phase of the project includes a survey of the Aulnay territory, its interactions with adjacent communities, and identifying the sectors or topics that should be given special attention in the planning activities. It also includes a review of other jurisdictions that faced similar challenges as Aulnay and have responded with innovative solutions.

As part of the project activities, the Department of Town, Environment & Transportation of the School is teaming up with the Paris- Est D-School to organize a series of workshops for elected town officials, town staff and graduate students to jointly work on some of the topics. We have been invited by the Paris-Est D-School to organize a 2-day workshop with their audience this December to introduce our own approach to strategic foresight and  planning, which is somewhat different from the rich and well established practice of foresight in France.

Looking forward to brush up on our French, interact with our French colleagues and learn from practicing in a different environment.

Toronto’s Lab Movement – An Opportunity for Collective Impact

Friday, November 1st, 2013

On November 6th OCAD University’s Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab) will be hosting the next meeting of Lab Practitioners in the series organized by MaRS SiG. The speaker for this meeting is Hal Hamilton, who will be sharing lessons learned from his decade of work with the Sustainable Food Lab.

The series has been successful in achieving a number of important objectives: It raised awareness about individual labs and their work; it highlighted lessons learned from the various practices in labs, and last but not least, it continued strengthening the links between the various members thus helping the emergence of stronger and more resilient community.

As the community matures, there is a sense emerging that the community is seeking something beyond the networking and learning about other labs. In conversations with a few of the regular participants, I sensed that a new need is emerging, a need to tackle something bigger, beyond the capabilities of the single labs. This reminded me of the collective impact approach described in a paper of Stanford Social Innovation Review. Could we find together one big challenge that we all apply our experimentation and our multidisciplinary collaboration capabilities to address? Or has the movement not matured that far yet and needs more time to get to that point? It’s definitely worth a deep conversation at the next gathering.

Fifth Take Over Toronto Dinner

Friday, November 1st, 2013

Think you should be running Toronto? So do the organizers of the fifth Take Over Toronto Dinner. Come out for dinner on November 13th and meet a group of creative co-conspirators, who really ought to know each other better.

This is the fifth Takeover event in a series, each of which is hosted by a participating organization. This one is hosted by Idee Inc.  who are hosting us for the second time! There are always good conversations, interesting discussions and brief show & tell around hardware/software projects the host is working on.

Participants are to bring something with them to share: it could be a story, a favorite book they’d like to pass on, something they found of relevance or value for others. Be prepared to share or to sing for your supper! 🙂

Registration is here.