Dialogues at The Garden - 3 Dec 2020

At The Garden of the SSE House of Innovation, we share what the luminary psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi proposed in the 1980s: in AI-powered organizations and societies, humans become problem finders, ultimately responsible for defining which problems make sense to address. Clearly, the search for problems worth solving is guided by purpose, by what is meaningful to us as individual human beings, and by what an organization stands for, its values and identity. How can a focus on purpose be more than a vague aspiration with little impact on value, and instead drive innovation for real?

The 2020 edition of the Dialogues in The Garden was an exciting deep-dive at the intersection between innovation, leadership, and design. People who connected with us participated in a vibrant conversation on the role of purpose in problem finding, on its translation into actual economic and social value through novel reframing techniques, on the benefits that design offers in reflecting and acting with purpose, and on the impact of AI. 

Around the table, presenting insights and steering the conversation,were Roberto Verganti and Mattia Bianchi, professors and directors of The Garden, corporate leaders who are actively working in this area, as well as our most talented graduate students, who critically drive what SSE does and why! The event was filled with research-based findings, concrete recommendations, possibilities to network, interactive tasks and an award ceremony: the winner of the 2020 Michael Treschow Scholarship was announced and awarded during this event. 

This event was organized in collaboration with the Swedish Center for Digital Innovation.