Is there a need for Kororoit Institute?

Many of the Kororoit Institute Proponents and Supporters Association are academics or are otherwise closely associated with academic institutions. Many are practitioners consulting or working in industry. Some are both. Those of us academics who are old enough remember the days when "academic freedom" meant you had a platform that allowed you to work on problems of your choice and to try radical approaches to solve them. Now, years of budget cuts and galloping bureaucracy have made it too difficult and too risky to one's career to work beyond the constraints of departmental and disciplinary paradigms. Industry has never been particularly conducive to the kind of cross disciplinary innovation that offer new problem solving perspectives.

The world faces a number of apparently intractable problems, such as global warming, peak production of oil and minerals that are critical for important industries and technologies, urban sprawl, ageing infrastructures, increasing pollution of the air, sea and land - many of them ultimately related to unrestrained population growth. It is evident that existing academic and industrial organizations are not encouraging the kind of lateral thinking able to see problems in new ways that suggest new kinds of solutions that might actually work.

Our positive experiences with interdisciplinary projects and thinking, and our frustrations with the existing barriers and impediments to such work in present academic and industrial environments has led us to consider what we can do to build a better platform to support such work and innovation. Our experiences with open collaboration, complex systems, emergent organization, knowledge management and facilitating technologies led us to coalesce around the concept of building an institution that would actively nourish and promote collaborative work while making this available through communication, community consultation, professional services and the provision of learning opportunities.