January 24, 2023

Image: courtesy of Leo Manjarrez / Unsplash

Becoming Regenerative: Transcending ‘sustainability’ through new forms of entrepreneurship and interspecies creativity

Seminar with Tuukka Toivonen
London, 13 February 2023

How do new ideas and projects driven by regenerative goals and the desire to ‘create with and for nature’ grow into tangible products, services and systems with regenerative outcomes? This presentation explores—based on emerging research—how pioneering entrepreneurs and designers apply regenerative thinking during their extended innovation journeys that often entail co-creation with living organisms as well as multiple entrepreneurial paradoxes and pressures. This presentation will be relevant to researchers and students of innovation, creativity, sustainability, entrepreneurship and design.

By ‘regeneration’, this talk refer first to organisational and cultural orientations where a strong priority is placed on transcending conventional notions of ‘sustainability’ – or those approaches that aim to merely reduce ecological damage or ‘do less harm’ – through achieving significant restorative impacts that help living systems thrive. It can be argued that creative, entrepreneurial activity in this realm is likely to begin from the discovery of ‘regenerative potentials’ at the intersection of a living system(s) – such as an organism (e.g., microalgae) or an ecosystem (such as that of a lake suffering from severe pollution) – and a prospective product, service or system or a combination thereof that also responds to social and/or market needs. Far from an established, well-researched domain, regenerative entrepreneurship, innovation and design remain at a highly experimental stage where (unlike in, say, regenerative agriculture) little clarity exists on when and how regenerative goals, practices or co-creation with living organisms lead to regenerative outcomes.

About

Tuukka Toivonen holds a PhD from the University of Oxford where he also completed a prestigious three-year Junior Research Fellowship in Management, researching social innovation in Japan and completing a full monograph. He has co-published original research in some of the most competitive, coveted global peer-reviewed journals in organisation and management studies, including The Academy of Management Journal (with O. Idoko, H. Jha & S. Harvey). Currently, Tuukka serves as a Reader (research professor) in Regenerative Creativity at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, where he also directs the transdisciplinary MA Innovation Management programme. In addition, he holds associate professor-level appointments at the Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy at University College London and GLOCOM, International University of Japan. Tuukka is an ESRC-funded scholar with a long-term focus on creative processes in entrepreneurship, regenerative design and innovative organisations. Hybrid creativity and intelligence – new forms of creativity that arise through active interrelating between human, nonhuman biological and machine intelligences—are among Tuukka’s emerging interests, along with the analysis and design of diverse collaborative communities and interdisciplinary projects within top universities and university-private sector networks.