Sustainability, Technology and the Dynamics of Rapid Change

Our world's most pressing challenges, such as Climate Change, energy insecurity, water insecurity, social inequity, and food insecurity are integrated challenges that are marked by scale, complexity, and urgency. In some ways, the state of the crisis is a manifestation of our current approaches and institutional structures. Our disciplines work in silos, but meanwhile the challenges are integrated. Pure technology or policy measures fail to give us the scaled outcomes that we desire, and therefore our approach needs to encompass the integrated nature of these scaled challenges. The difficulty of challenges of this class requires that we develop new innovation methodologies. Since at the level of the larger system, the boundary conditions encompass technology, economics, geo-political constraints, socio-cultural backdrops, the human behavior, the regulatory landscape and resource flows, we need effective ways of intervening with multi-agency in order to change system behavior. Prof Banerjee who is the director of Stanford ChangeLabs, will talk about how his team is combining Design Thinking with other approaches such as technology strategy, diffusion theory, and behavioral sciences to develop innovation methodologies to address scaled challenges.

Speaker: Banny Banerjee, Stanford

i4Energy Seminar