RESEARCH OVERVIEW
Academia is best equipped to address global problems by investing in building strong interdisciplinary efforts dedicated to pursuing such problems. At the Kozmetsky Global Collaboratory we are cultivating a capacity for interdisciplinary research that is field-based and collaborative. Our approach is unique in that the research we conduct:
• Originates in scholars' personal aspirations to address the problems and challenges of our time globally
• Is crystallized during visits, informal gatherings and discussions on interdisciplinary ideas hosted by KGC
• Focuses these scholars' passions for addressing issues of our times within the context of research field-sites situated globally
• Identifies and defines the topics of their research projects (including undergraduate and masters' theses, doctoral dissertations, and post doctoral research rooted within the context of their inquiry) and leads to inviting faculty members from pertinent departments to serve on dissertation committees
• Advances theories and methods for conducting interdisciplinary research that involves collaborative research engagements with underserved communities
• Validates that a scholar can pursue their passion for addressing global challenges facing humanity with discipline and rigor, and enables scholars to learn how to sustain their scholarly inquiry throughout their life, as an expression of who they are
• Enriches the scholarship of the next generation of scholars as current and former scholars continue their affiliation with KGC to mentor, guide and collaborate with incoming rising young scholars
• Creates and fosters KGC's culture for continuing the nurturing and supporting of inquiries of scholars engaged in contributing to the KGC mission to "Accelerate the creation of shareable global prosperity through collaborative interdisciplinary field-based scholarship that embodies and sustains an ethic of timeless engagement with the world we inherit, help create and leave behind."
CURRENT RESEARCH
KGC currently supports a global community of researchers, who range from young scholars who just discovered their paths of inquiry to seasoned senior research scholars who serve as guides to younger scholars. Each individual has a unique line of research, and collaborative projects emerge from the complementary interests of scholars. Each of these innovative projects address the challenge of creating shareable prosperity in different ways.
COLLABORATIVE PROJECTS
THE PROFESSIONAL SCHOOL FOR SHAREABLE PROSPERITY
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The Professional School for Shareable Prosperity (PSSP) is a project that prototypes the education and training of scholars and practitioners who seek to create shareable prosperity. It draws inspiration from Flexner’s 1910 report on medical education in the U.S. This report transformed the theory and practice of medical education by fostering the link with research and by designating academic institutions responsible for medical education. PSSP aims to make KGC a sustainable home for scholars and create an academic environment that can support the creation of shareable prosperity as a professional pursuit.
- Read More about the Project
Scholars: Bhavna Hariharan, Jennifer Keller, Tea Lempiälä, Ram Nidumolu, Colleen Saxen, Syed Shariq, Neeraj Sonalkar
COLLABORATORY FOR REALIZING ENGINEERS' ASPIRATIONS FOR THE LAST MANAV (REALM)
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The vision for REALM is to build the ability in a new generation of engineers to contribute sustainably toward improving the lives of those living in extremely impoverished conditions. REALM builds design teams with engineering students and local universities, non-governmental organizations, and partners in impoverished communities in the Indian states of Gujarat and Rajasthan that focus on a lack of hygiene and sanitation.
- Read More about the Project
Scholars: Bhavna Hariharan (Co-Lead), Syed Shariq (Co-Lead), Susan Nourse
INDIVIDUAL PROJECTS
GLOBAL ENGINEERS' EDUCATION
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GEE is a curriculum that builds capacity in engineering students to design products and services with impoverished communities, rather than for them, and consider how these products and services can contribute to building a sustainable local economy and have a lasting impact on the community by building capacity in the community to engineer change in their lives. Her research investigates how to train students to work with their partners as equal participants, and whether the regular and reliable presence of students as partners in a village can help a community envision a different future for itself.
- Read More about the Project
Scholars: Bhavna Hariharan (Lead), Tea Lempiälä, Syed Shariq
INTERPERSONAL VIOLENCE PREVENTION (IVP) ACADEMY: EMPOWER, HEAL, THRIVE
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The project uniquely contributes to the vision of creating a world where women are not victims of interpersonal violence and men and women thrive by creating and maintaining an environment of shareable prosperity. It creates a therapeutic class that incorporates psychological skill development and physical empowerment training for women who have experienced trauma. A second class focuses on the empowerment of adolescent girls. It looks at change in levels of self-efficacy, esteem and assertiveness in women and girls.
- Read More about the Project
Scholars: Jennifer Keller (Lead)
BACKSTAGE INTERACTIONS FOR INNOVATION AND PROSPERITY (BINPRO)
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The BINPRO project aims to find ways in which back stage interaction, so called because it is typically shared only with trusted individuals in private, can be shared in professional contexts with relatively distant colleagues, enabling more authentic interaction to emerge. The project works with organizations in northern Europe and America, as well as organizations in developing world countries like India, Uganda, and Nigeria.
- Read More about the Project
Scholars: Tea Lempiälä (Lead)
MILLENIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP, WELLBEING, AND ECOSYSTEM PROJECT
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The Millennial Entrepreneurship, Wellbeing, and Ecosystem (Me-We) project creates new models of business leadership that combine ancient wisdom on the connections that bind human beings with recent research from psychology, economics and management theory. The project is developing practices that will encourage individual leaders and allow business leadership teams to recognize the hidden connections between their organization and a wide array of stakeholders, evaluate their current ability to address the well-being of these stakeholders, find small ways to act upon this understanding, and finally internalize this perspective and lead by example.
- Read More about the Project
Scholars: Ram Nidumolu (Lead)
HARVESTING ABUNDANCE FOR HEALTH AND HEALING
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The Garden Clinics project investigates how community gardens - called “garden clinics” because of their wide-ranging effects on different aspects of health and well-being - can serve as an environment for listening to and learning with currently marginalized populations . Two directions are being pursued: garden clinics as sites for community inclusion of people arriving to the US as refugees , and as sites for diabetic patients to grow and share healthy food and a supportive community.
- Read More about the Project
Scholars: Colleen Saxen (Lead), Rick Saxen, MD, Sarah Fackler, MD
SUSTAINABILITY OF FUTURE SELF
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The Sustainability of Future Self project has developed a practicum that costs almost nothing and encourages people to reflect in a disciplined way on their past life narratives and the aspirations they have for the future. By bringing together two groups of three individuals to collaborate over ten weeks, the practicum allows people to re-imagine, rediscover, clarify and sustainably live their unique aspirations for the future by sharing them with other participants. The SFS project aims at creating a sustainable society founded on each person becoming who they are in collaboration with others.
- Read More about the Project
Scholars: Syed Shariq (Lead), Bhavna Hariharan, Jennifer Keller, Koh Ming Wei, Susan Nourse, Michael Sims
REALIZING POSSIBILITIES THROUGH INTERPERSONAL INTERACTION
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The project is creating programs in Ahmedabad, India that offer the capacity to imagine and realize personal and community change. One program partners with a local university to help aspiring entrepreneurs build the ventures they envision, and a second program works with a local NGO to create opportunities for teams of disadvantaged children to imagine and implement ways to improve the situation around them.
- Read More about the Project
Scholars: Neeraj Sonalkar (Lead)
DISSERTATIONS
The following are nine doctoral dissertations that have been incubated at KGC.
NEERAJ SONALKAR
A Visual Representation for Characterizing Moment-to-Moment Concept Generation through Interpersonal Interactions in Engineering Design Teams Department of Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University, 2012
Advisors: Larry Leifer, Sheri Sheppard, Ade Mabogunje
BHAVNA HARIHARAN
Innovating Capability for Continuity of Inquiry in the face of Discontinuity within the Context of Engineering Education Research Department of Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University, 2011
Advisors: Sheri Sheppard, Syed Shariq, David Beach
CHRISTOPHER HAN
Decision Analytic Approach to Customer Experience Design Department of Management Science and Engineering, Stanford University, 2011
Advisors: Ronald Howard, Janine Giese-Davis, Larry Leifer
MALTE JUNG
Engineering Team Performance and Emotion: Affective Interaction Dynamics as Indicators of Design Team Performance Department of Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University, 2011
Advisors: Larry Leifer, James Gross, Pamela Hinds, Ralf Steinhart
TEA LEMPIÄLÄ
Entering the Backstage of Innovation: Tensions between the Collaborative Praxis of Idea Development and its Formal Staging in Organizations Department of Mangement and International Business, Aalto University, 2011
Advisor: Raimo Lovio
MARCEL DULAY
From Chaos to Harmony : Public Participation and Environmental Policy Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin, 2011
Advisor: David Eaton
LOUISE NIELSEN
Personal and Shared Experiential Concepts Department of Architecture and Design, Aalborg University, 2009
Advisors: Nicola Morelli, Poul Kyvsgaard, Christian Tollestrup
PIYA SORCAR
Teaching Taboo Topics without Talking about Them : an Epistemic Study of a New Approach to HIV/AIDS Prevention Education in India School of Education, Stanford University, 2009
Advisors: Shelly Goldman, Clifford Nass, Martic Carnoy, Cheryl Koopman
BENJAMIN SHAW
More than the Sum of the Parts: Shared Representation in Collaborative Design Interaction Department of Industrial Design Engineering, Royal College of Art, London, 2007
Advisors: Prue Bramwell-Davis, Helga Wild
FIELD SITES
The KGC has built collaborative relationships with research field sites around the globe, ranging from Hawai'i and Ohio to Finland, Taiwan, and India. Our partners at these field sites are full collaborators and participate equally in each project.
Collaborators: Susan Maddox, John De Fries, Daniel Akaka, Jr.
Collaborator: Dr. Narasimha Reddy Donthi
Collaborator: Colleen Saxen
Collaborators: Madhusudan Agarwal, Jyotsana Parmar, Nilam Thakkar
Collaborator: Dr. Tea Lempiälä
Collaborator: Koh Ming Wei
Collaborator: Dr. Jean-Yves Heurtebise
Collaborator: Mani Kandan
Collaborator: C.N. Paramsivan
Collaborators: Dr. Prem Kalra, Dr. Rajiv Shekhar
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
All of our current work builds upon the foundational research that has been pursued as a part of the KGC since 1997. Many of the following projects have been instantiated at field sites and departments elsewhere.
KNOWLEDGE, BELIEFS, AND INSTITUTIONS
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Read About the Project
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The project focuses on advancing the understanding of knowledge, beliefs and institutions in social change, and in the creation of sustainable prosperity. The research inquiry is inspired by the questions that are essential to understanding the issues facing the creation of shareable global prosperity: What can be understood from the evolution of institutional changes in developed countries that would better support the prospects for prosperity in the developing countries? Can indigenous beliefs and tradition in pre-literate communities and culture take advantage of digital visual technology to advance their institutions? If the creation of prosperity in indigenous communities were to succeed, what would be the implications for the evolution of institutions in developed countries? How do emerging technologies make the creation and transfer of knowledge more productive?
Research seeks to understand the interplay among cognition, belief systems, and institutions, and how they affect economic performance. Initial research argues that a deeper understanding of institutions' emergence, their working properties, and their effect on economic and political outcomes should begin from an analysis of cognitive processes. Research explores the nature of individual and collective learning, stressing that the issue is not whether agents are perfectly or boundedly rational, but rather how human beings actually reason and choose, individually and in collective settings. Research links processes of learning to institutional analysis, providing arguments in favor of what can be characterized as "cognitive institutionalism", and show that a full treatment of the phenomenon of path dependence should start at the cognitive level, proceed at the institutional level, and culminate at the economic level.
Mantzavinos, C., D. North, and S. Shariq. "Learning, Institutions, and Economic Performance." Perspectives on Politics. March 2004: 74-84.
Active from 2005-present
Scholars: Chrysostomos Mantzavinos, Douglass North, and Syed Shariq
COMMUNICATING WITH INTEGRITY
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Read About the Project
The Communication with Integrity project seeks to ensure the sustainability of innovative initiatives that require resources from those who want to provide support, financial and otherwise, over the long term. It seeks to understand the specialized language that emerges in young organizations and to rearticulate the messages of these initiatives into compelling narratives.
Active from 2011-2013
Scholars: Susan Nourse
IRIS SCHOLARSHIP ECOLOGY (ISE)
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Read About the Project
The Iris Scholarship Ecology (ISE) research project is a self-reflexive community of scholars engaged in explorations that could offer insights and practices for evolving a sustainable and verdant society. It seeks to nurture research for cultivating a patient multi-generational commitment to scholarship that embodies a post-disciplinary and collaborative mode of inquiry for understanding and characterizing the verdant society.
ISE is inspired by the strong interest of students at Stanford who are seeking to contribute solutions to the most urgent problems of the world. The responsibility felt by the students is equaled by their need and ability to contribute sustainable solutions. There is a strong need among students to act on the responsibility they feel towards the present and the future. Even though Stanford offers a range of learning opportunities to students through course work and research engagements, students still feel that there is an educational gap that needs to be filled. Students are also seeking to carry forward their project all the way to the implementation so that they can receive validation and satisfaction that comes from making a tangible impact in the world, and to have the opportunity to advance their projects to a sustainable venture, one that they can they develop and grow and continue to be part of after they have completed their education and training.
Realizing the practices that exist in academia and the field we need to engage with, each other’s practices enables collaboration to solve problems that we all face. This co-practicing is the way to a sustainable future for all. There is a loss of opportunity when we view the community in the field only as users of a solution and hence design and build solutions without their input. What is really needed is for communities to be more than just users. There is a need to recognize and acknowledge that they have the capacity to contribute and collaborate with students here as co-equals, in co-creating a shared context for advancing the inquiry. If the solution is built in collaboration with practitioners from the communities, then it can be indigenized and developed and implemented by them in the field without going through the challenges we face in the traditional approach of abstracting the knowledge first and then struggling to apply it to the specific local context of the field. This creates a more inclusive and sustainable world where students and scholars can engage in co-practicing with practitioners in the field to create timely and efficacious solutions.
Active from 2007-2010
Scholars: Syed Shariq, V. Balaji;
Students: Christopher Han, Bhavna Hariharan, Koh Ming Wei, Tea Lempiälä, Louise Nielsen, Colleen Saxen, Neeraj Sonalkar
COMMUNITY DIGITAL VISION AND VOICE NARRATIVE ENACTMENT (CO-DIVINE)
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Read About the Project
Community Digital Vision and Voice Narrative Enactment (Co-DiViNE) project is inspired by Karl Llewellyn's research on the narratives of Cheyenne legal institutions, Laura Nader’s work with judicial and cultural norms of the Zapotec Mountain Village, and the pioneering work of visual anthropologists (Sol Worth, Eric Michaels, among others) on the use of indigenous visual narratives creation by the pre-literate communities themselves, and on more recent uses of DiViNE technology by Ramesh Srinivasan with the Kumeyaay tribal community in San Diego.
The goal of the Co-DiViNE project is to develop collaboration with pre-literate communities in south India. The study of the visual and voice narratives of the villages will help create a baseline for their current knowledge, beliefs and institutions. As pre-literate communities work to prosper through the cultural and institutional innovations over time, the study can also analyze the visual and voice narratives on an ongoing basis to help understand the evolution of the indigenous knowledge, beliefs and institutions in these villages.
Co-DiViNE project is aimed at creating sustainable prosperity in chronically poor, oral communities. It is conceived as a collaborative mutual learning engagement between research scholars, post graduate interns and the pre-literate communities and cultures for helping the latter evolve their institutions by introducing to them the ability to create, store, organize and share their mimetic and mythic knowledge, beliefs and institutions in the oral and visual form. As such it is aimed at creating and sustaining affordances for collaborative co-presences using audio and video technology to manifest co-practices among and between students and scholars from the literate world and the rural practitioners from pre-literate Indian villages situated in the midst of poverty.
Hariharan, B., S. Shariq, S. Sheppard. "When Understanding Follows 'Experiencing': A Report from Research in the Field" International Journal of Engineering Education. March 2008: 434-442.
Active from 2005-2009
Scholars: Janine Giese-Davis, Ade Mabogunje, Syed Shariq;
Students: Bhavna Hariharan
CULTURALLY APPROPRIATE INTERFACES (TEACH: TECHNOLOGY WITH EVERYONE AT THE CENTER OF HUMANITY)
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Read About the Project
The inspiration for the TEACH Lab comes from three basic principles:
1. Research should emerge from the needs, values, and desires of each community, and should respect the dignity of all people.
2. Research should adhere to the highest standard, regardless of geography, economy, and culture.
3. Research should improve the quality of life in the communities being studied.
Though these principles have been fundamental in guiding social science in developed countries, relatively little research has been held to the same standards in the developing world. Much of this research is based on treating the needs and values of people in developed countries as standard and globally meaningful, and merely seeks to characterize developing countries in terms of differences from these norms. In contrast to best practices, methods of research and assessment in developing countries are not grounded in comparison, quantifiable measures, and scientific rigor. Because of these deficiencies, psychological and sociological research on technology in the developing world has not resulted in actionable design that improves the lives of communities.
TEACH Lab. Information and communication technologies hold much promise as empowering tools for populations that are critically dependent on timely and easy access to information about healthcare, agriculture and employment. The design and deployment of such technologies is clearly a complex problem, influenced by many social, cultural and psychological factors. The TEACH methodology of social science research, rooted in theoretically informed, rigorously controlled experimental research, and tested in over 100 published research studies and product design improvements, is one that we believe allows a fresh approach to this problem.
The TEACH Lab addresses locally relevant yet fundamental research questions that emerge from within communities in developing countries. Rather than asking whether groups are similar or different to developed countries, the questions are motivated by the unique needs and desires of local populations. For example, the lab explores: 1) learning about culturally taboo subjects; 2) shared use and ownership of technology; 3) interaction with technology through human intermediaries; and 4) psychological measurement in non-literate communities
Active from 2005-2008
Scholars: Clifford Nass, V. Balaji;
Students: Piya Sorcar, Abhay Sukumaran
SYNTHESIZING THEORIES OF COGNITIVE AND INSTITUTIONAL EVOLUTION
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Read About the Project
The research inquiry is inspired by the questions that are essential to understanding the issues facing the creation of shared global prosperity: How would the theory of cognitive evolution modify the understanding of the process of economic change? Because communities, regions, and nations today are hybrids of several historic stages in cognitive and cultural evolution, how do these elements factor in the explanation of the beliefs underlying the institutions? How does cognitive evolution modify the definition of the natural state and open access societies? How does the synthesis of theories of cognitive and institutional evolution help describe the way traditional and modern societies would transform and evolve over time?
The project focuses on new methods for merging theory and practice in international development. Societies at different stages in their internal social, cognitive, economic, and cultural evolution will be examined by an interdisciplinary group of experts. Researchers will examine a series of multidisciplinary topics to synthesize theories relevant to the creation of shared prosperity.
Active from 2005-2008
Scholars: Merlin Donald, Douglass North
ONTRUST
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Read About the Project
Active from 2004-2007
Scholars: Scott Brave, Sri Sridharan
REAL-TIME VENTURE DESIGN LAB (REVEL)
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Read About the Project
ReVeL began as an interdisciplinary research program that sought to create and disseminate knowledge, tools, models, and practices that advance access to shared global prosperity. ReVeL worked with early-stage ventures that had a focus on developing countries. The project facilitated trusted exploration between venture founding teams and experts from academia and industry in media-rich, interactive environments for the purpose of creating a cohesive, compelling venture narrative in real-time and thereby helped to significantly increase the success potential of the ventures in the developing world. ReVeL worked with 15 ventures, 8 in the US and 7 in India. This engagement brought to light the discovery on the differences in strategies between entrepreneurs living in cultures such as Asia and Africa and entrepreneurs living in cultures such as US and Western Europe.
See the evolution of the ReVeL methodology
See a poster explaining the ReVeL methodology
As with all good research, the ReVeL project has evolved, and one instantiation of it is the Venture Design Engineering Laboratory, which has field sites in Abeokuta, Nigeria and Ahmedabad, India.
Visit the Venture Design Engineering Laboratory
Active from 1999-2007
Scholars: Cheri Anderson, Per Aage Brandt, Merlin Donald, Janine Giese-Davis, Satinder Gill, George Kozmetsky, Ade Mabogunje, Clifford Nass, Mark Nicolson, Knut Oxnevad, Syed Shariq, Michael Sims, Mark Turner;
Students: Resmi Arjunapillai, Marcel Dulay, Bhavna Hariharan, Jon Johansen, Malte Jung, Marie Kobler, Dylan Marks, Sheba Najmi, Akshay Rajwade, Sunder Ramkumar, Ben Shaw, Neeraj Sonalkar, Maya Yutsis
DRIVERS OF THE 21ST CENTURY
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Read About the Project
Active from 2001-2002
Scholars: George Kozmetsky, Knut Oxnevad, Syed Shariq, Raymond Yeh
KNOWLEDGE NETWORKS, EXCHANGES, AND USES (KNEXUS)
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Read About the Project
Knexus is a global transdisciplinary community of scholars from social and natural sciences, and practitioners with real world experience from the field working together on the research projects on the networks, exchanges and uses of knowledge. The KNEXUS model has been developed with the following principles in mind to:
1. Create a long-term program that would draw on knowledge across disciplines and generations
2. Build a global research community that fosters interdisciplinary research focusing on problems related to the emerging knowledge economy
3. Facilitate interaction between the public and private sectors to better develop a meaningful research agenda
4. Transfer knowledge and findings to those who have an impact in policy and decision making to promote balanced global growth and prosperity
The Knexus community brings together and integrates scholarship in the following three areas:
1. Develop a deeper theoretical and empirical understanding of knowledge networks and their role in economic growth and change;
2. Develop innovative research methods that draw from a range of social science disciplines to analyze, measure, and map organizational learning, knowledge transfer, and the role of institutions;
3. Develop findings and insights for promoting the generation of knowledge, economic growth, and institutions that enhance prosperity and democracy in emerging economies
The following three Knexus Research Symposia were organized and convened:
1. First Knexus Research Symposium focused on, Evolution of Institutions, Organizations, and Knowledge Networks in Economic Growth, Bechtel Conference Center, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University, August 2, 1999.
The Stanford Report's article on KNEXUS, August 11, 1999
2. Second Knexus Research Symposium focused on, The Institutionalization of Knowledge: How Institutions Develop and Spread Knowledge, Bechtel Conference Center, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University, July 31 - August 2, 2000.
Agenda and Participants of the Second KNEXUS Symposium
3. Third Knexus Research Symposium focused on, Ideas about Social, Political and Economic Change: Theory and Empirical Evidence, Bechtel Conference Center, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University, August 8-10, 2001.
Agenda and Participants of the Third KNEXUS Symposium
Active from 1997-2000
Steering Committee: James March, Walter Powell (Co-Principal Investigator), Nathan Rosenberg (Co-Principal Investigator), Syed Shariq, Gavin Wright;
Scholars: Mie Augier, Barry Blumberg, Merlin Donald, George Kozmetsky, Ray Levitt, Chris Mantzavinos, Bertin Martens, Bill Miller, Douglass North, Michael Sims, Sri Sridharan, Mark Turner, Paul Unruh, Morten Vendelø, Michael Wakelin