A System Innovation Approach for Science-Stakeholder Interface: Theory and Application to Water-Land-Food-Energy Nexus

The Water-Food-Energy Nexus can support a general model of sustainable development, balancing resources with increasing economic/productive expectations, as e.g., in agriculture. We synthesise lessons from Greece's practical and research experience, identify knowledge and application gaps, and propose a novel conceptual framework to tackle these challenges. Thessaly (Central Greece), the country's driest region and largest agricultural supplier is used as an example. The area faces a number of water quantity and quality issues, ambitious production-economic objectives, continuous (historically) drought and flood events, conflicts, administrative and economic issues, under serious climate change impacts. A detailed assessment of the current situation is carried out, covering all these aspects, for the first time in an integrated way. Collaboration gaps among different stakeholders are identified as the biggest impediment to socially acceptable actions. For the first time, to our knowledge, the Nexus is set as a keystone to develop a novel framework to reverse the situation and achieve sustainable management under socially acceptable long-term visions. The proposed framework is based on Systems' Theory, innovation, uses a multi-disciplinary platform to bring together all relevant stakeholders, provides scientific support and commitment, and makes use of technological advances for the system's improvement.

COVID-19 Innovation Approach to Support Wellbeing, Anxiety, and Depression Through Gaming Technologies

With this current Covid-19 pandemic, colleges and Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) must focus on applying educational experiences that are enriching, joyful, rewarding, and engaging. With such dynamic changes to the education systems due to the Covid-19 pandemic, gaming technologies have played an essential part in improving retention, engagement, motivation, and wellbeing. The needs of students are ever-changing within the pandemic, and institutions need to focus on wellbeing, anxiety, and depression. Current evidence does support that institutions have seen an increase of students seeking support from specialist teams for anxiety, depression, and wellbeing issues. The preliminary study used within this research is used to discover if gaming approaches can assist individuals/students who are experiencing distress within the Covid-19 pandemic. The research finding within the preliminary analysis studies does show that the use of a Game Jam provided students a chance to interact with others, assist with aspects of engaging in activities outside the everyday routines.

Enabling Systems Innovation in Climate Change Adaptation: Exploring the Role for MEL

Traditional monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) approaches, methods, and tools no longer reflect the dynamic complexity of the severe (or “super-wicked”) problems that define the Anthropocene: climate change, environmental degradation, and global pandemics. In late 2019, the Adaptation Fund’s Technical Evaluation Reference Group (AF-TERG) commissioned a study to identify and assess innovative MEL approaches, methods, and technologies to better support and enable climate change adaptation (CCA) and to inform the Fund’s own approach to MEL. This chapter presents key findings from the study, with seven recommendations to support a systems innovation approach to CCA: Promote and lead with a CCA systems innovation approach, engaging with key concepts of complex systems, super-wicked problems, the Anthropocene, and socioecological systems. Engage better with participation, inclusivity, and voice in MEL. Overcome risk aversion in CCA and CCA MEL through field testing new, innovative, and often more risky MEL approaches. Demonstrate and promote using MEL to support and integrate adaptive management. Work across socioecological systems and scales. Advance MEL approaches to better support systematic evidence and learning for scaling and replicability. Adapt or develop MEL approaches, methods, and tools tailored to CCA systems innovation.

Reciprocal Innovation: A New Approach to Equitable and Mutually Beneficial Global Health Research and Partnership

Background: Global health researchers and partnerships often discount the potential for mutual learning and benefit to address shared health challenges across high and low- and middle-income settings. Drawing from a 30-year partnership called AMPATH that started between Indiana University in the US and Moi University in Kenya, we describe an innovative approach and program for mutual learning and benefit coined “reciprocal innovation.” In this paper, we define reciprocal innovation and identify its core principles with illustrative examples and describe building a reciprocal innovation program established in 2018 at the Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (CTSI).Results: Reciprocal innovation harnesses a bidirectional, co-constituted, and iterative exchange of ideas, resources, and innovations to address shared health challenges across diverse global settings. The success of the AMPATH partnership in western Kenya, particularly in the areas of HIV/AIDS and community health, resulted in several innovations in Kenya being “brought back” to the US. To facilitate and promote the bidirectional flow of learning and innovations, the Indiana CTSI reciprocal innovation program hosts annual meetings (hosted in Indiana and Kenya) of multinational researchers and practitioners to identify shared health challenges across diverse global settings and facilitate partnership building and collaboration. The program supports pilot grants for projects that demonstrate reciprocal exchange and benefit. The program has produced a wealth of educational materials, including videos, webinars and an online dashboard, to train investigators on reciprocal innovation approaches in global health. Lessons learned in building a reciprocal innovation program include increasing awareness of reciprocal approaches among investigators and in supporting collaboration for global–local research. While many global health investigators have strong collaborators with international partners, a challenge has been partnering with “local” Indiana researchers to create reciprocal learning and benefit. Conclusions: The transformative power of global health to address systemic health inequities embraces equitable and reciprocal partnerships with mutual benefit across countries and communities of academics, practitioners, and policymakers, as demonstrated through a reciprocal innovation approach. Leveraging a long-standing partnership, the Indiana CTSI has built a reciprocal innovation program with promise to redefine global health for shared wellbeing at a truly global scale.

Bringing Structure to the Wave Energy Innovation Process with the Development of a Techno-Economic Tool

Current wave energy development initiatives assume that available designs have the potential for success through continuous learning and innovation-based cost reduction. However, this may not be the case, and potential winning technologies may have been overlooked. The scenario creation tool presented in this paper provides a structured method for the earliest stages of design in technology development. The core function of the scenario creation tool is to generate and rank scenarios of potential Wave Energy Converter (WEC) attributes and inform the user on the areas of the parameter space that are most likely to yield commercial success. This techno-economic tool uses a structured innovation approach to identify commercially attractive and technically achievable scenarios, with a scoring system based on their power performance and costs. This is done by leveraging performance and cost data from state-of-the-art wave energy converters and identifying theoretical limits to define thresholds. As a result, a list of scored solutions is obtained depending on resource level, wave energy converter hull shape, size, material, degree of freedom for power extraction, and efficiency. This scenario creation tool can be used to support private and public investors to inform strategy for future funding calls, and technology developers and researchers in identifying new avenues of innovation.