"Bringing the collective intelligence of this community together is the only way to solve our problems", was one of the main statements of the national conference 'Collective Impact as a Pathway to Reinvigorate Broadening Participation in STEM', held at UC San Diego.
About 200 delegates from primary, secondary and higher education, government, industry and nonprofit organizations attended the conference on Jan. 20-22 coordinated by the Graduate Division. Aim of the event was to discuss and reflect how the U.S. should work with the complex social challenge of increasing diversity in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) areas.
The NSF INCLUDES (Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science) looks to create and establish networks and partnerships with stakeholders from different fields. The goal is to Get everyone together to work on a common program – increasing and expanding participation in science and engineering.
Colin Nelson, Director of Enterprise Innovation Consulting at HYPE Innovation, presented on the social dynamics that underpin how large or diverse groups collaborate online in companies such as Fujitsu, Harley Davidson and NASA. According to Nelson, the same principles that these corporations use to coordinate large and diverse groups to meet business goals can be applied to the challenge of broadening participation in STEM fields.
“Each group has their own role to play, we all have different strengths and we experience the challenge of inclusion in different ways,” said Nelson. “Only by coming together and bringing the collective intelligence of this community are we going to fix this problem.”
UC San Diego has been working with HYPE since 2015. They want to leverage the collective expertise of the whole campus (64,000 people) and their enthusiasm, to gather more and more perspectives from the UC San Diego community. In 2016, they hosted a HYPE regional innovation forum where they granted insights into their Innovation Labs.
Get your own insight into the Innovation Labs Tour at UC San Diego: http://blog.hypeinnovation.com/news/innovative-hype-regional-forum-ucsd
See what other participants said and read the full article about the conference at UC San Diego on:
http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/feature/leveraging_collective_impact_to_increase_diversity
