How To
Education: From Innovation Islands to Systemic Change
Please note: This is a Sign-In Session with limited capacity. Click “Mark this Session” to reserve your place. If you can’t attend, please unmark it so others may join. Seats of participants who haven’t arrived 5 minutes after the start will be released to others on site.
Education is full of pilots that never scale. This How To session shows how to move from isolated innovation to wider institutional or system change using futures thinking, systems mapping and participatory design. Participants analyse hidden assumptions, identify where change may have the greatest effect and design practical ways to begin change at institutional, regional or policy level. You’ll leave with tools to understand why systems resist change and identify where action is possible.
Gül Akcaova
Lead Futurist, SURF
Gül Akcaova is the lead futurist at SURF - the cooperative for ICT in (higher) education and research in the Netherlands, and the National Education & Research Network. With a keen fascination for IT innovation in education and research, she explores in her role the potential impact of new technologies and emerging concepts on education and research. Her background in management studies provides her with the ability to approach developments from various angles. Currently, she leads a research project on the use of foresight tools to navigate digital transformation in education.
Vanessa Abel
Senior Programme Manager AI@EUR, Erasmus University Rotterdam
Vanessa has a background in innovation- and programme management, law, digital transformation and emerging technologies. Before her current role, she was the Programme Director of ErasmusX, a disruptive innovation programme of the Erasmus University Rotterdam.
Her work increasingly focuses on how organisations can move from strategy and experimentation to responsible, scalable and institution wide implementation, supported by futures thinking and scenario development that help institutions navigate uncertainty and shape their desired future.
Mark Cole
Strategic Foresight and Responsibility Technology Lead, SURF
Mark Cole works at the intersection of emerging technologies, innovation and organisational change. He is interested in how education and research organisations can move beyond isolated innovation to achieve sustainable systemic change. His work explores systems thinking, futures thinking and the human and organisational conditions that enable new ideas to be embedded in practice.