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Disruptive Inclusive Innovation Seminar: Beyond pandemic and the road to 2050

Leader

 

Today, society is at the crossroad for change.  This is especially true for meeting immediate challenges of post pandemic as well as long term sustainability challenges reflected in the UN Sustainable Development Goals(SDGs) and the Government of Japan’s goal of Net Carbon Zero by 2050, which is shared by several other countries.  Science, technology and innovation (STI)  will continuously take critical part to bring about the new way of life. Advances in STI, however, should pay attention to societal aspects and distributional issues within and between the countries and generations to make net carbo zero society a reality.

 

Disruptive Inclusive Innovation (DII) is innovation that disrupts conventional way of things and includes vulnerable population who had been excluded as the target of service from public and private sector (eg. M-PESA, use of mobile in financial transaction made financial inclusion possible for many low-income strata without bank account among others). With this concept, seminars were organized during the fiscal year 2019(1 remaining in 2020 due to the Covid 19), on selected themes: Digital transformation of agriculture in Africa, Social Impact investment, Lean and rapid prototype experimentation, Use of modern tools (virtual reality, digital technology) in solving social issues.  These innovative attempts are catalyst to make transformation towards SDGs reality.

 

“Beyond the Pandemic and the Road to 2050” is the subtheme for this year, anticipating the wave of transformation following the pandemic and climate challenge set at 2050. Attention would be paid to DII that concerns pillars of transformation namely, technology, institutions, business model, market, human resources and policy.  The focus is place to understand how innovation can be able to bring viable future for all.

The aim of seminar is to understand the cutting-edge ideas responding to social challenges that enable to enhance social well-being for all the population.  Each seminar aims to: 1) pick up frontier knowledge on the subject with invited speakers; 2) understand the idea with practical implications; 3) create dialogue among participants of all walks of life beyond normal ‘silo’ in particular, academia, policy makers, civil society and private sectors.