Posts Tagged ‘collaboration’

TRIEC Connector Program – Pilot

Monday, January 26th, 2015

TRIEC, the Toronto Regional Immigrants Employment Council, is launching an interesting new program called Connector. The program creates networking opportunities for skilled internationally trained professionals, and their established GTA counterparts. The idea behind the program is simple enough: business needs talent; talent needs opportunities. Connect offers to provide such opportunities through the network effect. We are thrilled to join the Advisory Board of this interesting project.  Its first meeting will be held on Thursday January 29, 9-11 AM at the offices of TRIEC in Toronto.

SSBMG January 2015 Meeting

Monday, January 12th, 2015

The Strongly Sustainable Business Model Group will be holding its January meeting on Tuesday January 13th, 4:30-6:00 PM at OCAD University’s Strategic Innovation Lab. On the Agenda for this month are news and updates about members activities and achievements as well as a discussion on how to measure the progress of the Group towards achieving its mission: The acceleration of the transition of small and medium enterprises (SME) to  sustainability.

xClinic Stakeholder Meeting

Tuesday, November 18th, 2014

On Wednesday November 19th we are convening a meeting of all stakeholders in xClinic+, an evolution of the original xClinic concept integrating more clearly the cultural change agenda of the project. Since the original charette (collaborative design) of 2010 the ideas underlying the project have evolved and the spectrum of interested persons has broadened. In addition a team of graduate students of the Strategic Foresight & Innovation program at OCAD University has explored various models for sustainable operations of xClinic. They will be presenting their findings at the meeting, which is being hosted by the Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab). If you are interested in joining the project you are welcome to attend the meeting. Attendance is free but seating is limited so you have to register on Evenbrite.

Copenhagen Studio Summit 2014

Saturday, September 13th, 2014

Leveraging the 7th Art of Management & Organization Conference 2014 at the Copenhagen Business School (CBS), Stefan Meisiek from the CBS and Moura Quwayle from the Sauder Business School at University of British Columbia organized a “Studio Summit” with a limited number of participants (25-30) to explore the state of the art in using the studio method for education and how the envelope could be further pushed.

The 3-day conference was very rich in exchanges and learning so no blog can really do it justice. However, it might be useful to inform about some of the insights gained through the perspective of this one participant.

The first insight was that the studio method is being used in a very broad spectrum of variations and interpretations. There were examples of almost every medium from performing arts to film making to creation of art objects and strong interaction between learners and learning facilitators. What surprised many participants is the discovery that the use of the studio method is more widely spread in business and engineering education than previously expected. This included for example several programs at Harvard’s School of Engineering & Applied Science (SEAS), a film making approach to teaching leadership theories and emotional intelligence from Sacramento State University and an interesting use of art object creation for business students from ESCP Europe (École Supérieure de Commerce à Paris) France.

Second, there are may emerging developments and a strong appetite for developing the method further, which may indicate the increasing need that educational institutions face to “scale up” their programs that use the studio method. This need is also observed in corporations, governments and NGOs mostly stemming from the drive to innovate in order to maintain competitiveness. One of the outcomes of the Studio Summit is the creation of a LinkedIn group to host the network connections resulting from the summit.

Several interesting models for the studio model were developed during the summit and will be highlighted in a number of places. We’ll only mention here the so-called “Chair” model (later also dubbed the “divan” model), which was the result of a break-out group led by Richard Blythe, Dean of the School of Architecture and Design at RMIT with Daved Barry (Copenhagen Business School), Hakan Ozcelik (Sacremento State), Sylvain Bureau (ESCP Europe), Jaclyn Wilson (ESADE Business School) and Nabil Harfoush (OCAD University). A special blog will be dedicated to that model soon.

 

Como Innovation Summit 2014 – Authors Retreat

Saturday, September 13th, 2014

The Como Innovation Summit started in 2012 with the objectives of creating an “invisible college” or network of leading professionals in the field of innovation. The focus initially was on innovation education, although the scope is expanding rapidly. In the first two summits held near Como lake in Italy, a number of interesting observations were made about the emergence of multidisciplinary higher education in a multiplicity of forms. The idea was born to collect those observations in a book in order to alert the higher education community to this development, provide guidance on how to start your own multidisciplinary programs, and offer a collection of already successful programs from around the world as examples. The book idea was pitched to the publisher Springer, who agreed to publish the book in its innovation series. In order to complete the contents of this collectively authored book it was decided to dedicate the Como 2014 summit as a retreat of the book’s authors to finish their respective chapters. The book is intended to be available for Como Summit 2015. Our own Dr. Nabil Harfoush is participating in this project with responsibility together with Dr. Paola  Bertola from Politecnico di Milano for a principle chapter plus a collection of invited short chapters describing select multidisciplinary programs from all over the world.

Studio Summit at Copenhagen Business School

Sunday, August 31st, 2014

As part of the 7th Art of Management and Organization Conference 2014 of the Copenhagen Business School (CBS), Stefan Meisiek of CBS and Moura Quayle of University of British Columbia organized a summit dedicated to the studio teaching/learning method.

Stefan had started the Studio at CBS three years ago, and it has grown to become a space for education and industry interaction over time. The summit is meant to connect likeminded individuals, exchange experiences, and lift studio work to the next level, beyond the formulaic.

The first day was dedicated to exploring the various studio practices of the participants and understanding the current state of studio education and the use of the studio method in general. The format was that of a World Café with a synthesis in Plenum. It was encouraging to discover how may business schools were experimenting seriously with variations of the studio method.

On the second day we explored in 5 breakout groups how to push the envelope of the studio method, particularly into domains other than architecture, art or design. Some interesting frameworks emerged, which will be presented in a blog soon, so stay tuned.

On the last day the agenda is to synthesize the gained insights and findings and chart the next steps for this new community. It goes without saying that intense networking and peer learning is happening constantly even late night after a long day. It is what makes these small focused gatherings (25-30 people) such refreshing and learning intensive events.

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.

Taking Over Toronto

Saturday, February 2nd, 2013

The Toronto Overlappers community has been seeing a resurgence of activity recently thanks to the initiative of Michael Dila founder of Foundery and the support of Overlappers like Leila Boujnane, CEO of Idee Inc., and Mathew Milan, CEO of Normative Design who hosted monthly dinners for the group in November and December 2012. On February 6th the Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab) at OCAD University will be hosting the next dinner gathering of the community.

In true Overlap fashion, no strict agenda was set for these gatherings. Beyond strengthening the bonds and introducing new friends into the community, the conversation that is starting to emerge is exploring the real potential for Toronto to become the global hub for an innovation for change movement and how the Overlap community could play a leading role in it. Stay tuned for what is certainly a very exciting and promising emergent thread.

A Week of Awards

Wednesday, July 25th, 2012

This week two of the educational programs I have been involved with have received awards. First, the core curriculum of the new Design, Engineering & Commerce (DEC) College at Philadelphia University was recognized for its transformational nature and won the Core77 Design Award in Educational Initiative category. The jury commented on all finalists by video; the DEC segment is towards the end but may be worth watching to understand why the program won top honors.

Then the World Future Society announced its F:BL 2012 awards (Futures: BetaLaunch 2012) and I was thrilled to learn that the Strategic Foresight & Innovation (SFI) Masters Program at OCAD University has been selected as one of the top future-oriented start-ups.

When innovators go into uncharted areas and design new solutions, they frequently can’t tell whether they were right or not about their innovation. It is only when their work is recognized by others that they can reduce uncertainty and feel on the right track. There is no better moment for innovators! Congratulations to the teams at DEC and SFI for their excellence.

Mentoring a 2012 DiverseCity Fellow

Sunday, June 17th, 2012

DiverseCity Fellows is a one-year action-oriented fellowship program that is inspired by a collective leadership model where leaders from all sectors work together to tackle some of the most complex issues and opportunities in the region. The program is jointly sponsored by DiverseCity (the Greater Toronto Leadership Project), CivicAction (Greater Toronto CivicAction Alliance) and the Maytree Foundation.

Twenty-eight Fellows from across the GTA were selected through a competitive application process for the 2012 program. The 2012 DiverseCity Fellows are committed rising leaders with tremendous passion for the city- region and great potential to effect positive change. They are almost halfway through the one-year leadership development program. One of four components of the Fellows program is the mentoring relationship it offers. I am honored to have been invited to mentor one of the program fellows.  The 2012 mentoring program will be launched on Monday June 18 at 5:30 PM on the 40th floor of the RBC tower downtown Toronto.