Visioneers
&
Venturers

SUNY Polytechnic’s Joint Center for Creativity, Design, and Venturing (JCCDV) was created in 2017 by grants from the State University of New York System Performance Improvements Funds project and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The center is co-directed by Drs. Robert Edgell (College of Business Management) and Daryl Lee (College of Arts & Sciences) and is supported by the generous funding noted above, and from other sources including NYSTEC, the Community Foundation of Herkimer and Oneida Counties and others. In addition to the center directors, faculty members of the center presently include Drs. Maarten Heyboer, Lisa Berardino, Kristina Boylan, Marie-Odile Richard, Ana Jofre, and Jim Staihar.

The challenges of a complex, rapidly changing, globalized 21st-century world calls for individuals who can adapt not only in behavior, but also in thinking through and anticipating situations of complexity and uncertainty. To address these challenges, new ways of collaborating across disciplines is needed. Solutions for survival are needed for our species and our planet; transcending that, the ability to thrive in sustainable and productive environments is a vision well worth developing, sharing, and operationalizing. Contributors to that vision think creatively to solve problems, envision opportunities for making positive change, and possess the confidence to take risks and venture.

Yet projects integrating humanities, arts and design, and business education are relatively uncommon, in part because of the significant philosophical, cultural, disciplinary, and institutional differences among these domains. To create greater value from and theoretical and practical synthesis among these divergent perspectives, the Visioneers and Venturers conference aims to build meaningful and lasting interdisciplinary collaborations at both the curricular and scholarly levels. The Visioneers and Venturers conference is an invitation to critically examine our individual, professional, and social identities--are there identities which can serve to further the vision of thriving in the present and future? Can we develop new ones?

The JCCDV will enable multiple interdisciplinary activities including research, student engagement, and community engagement and aims to address the following needs:

• Student needs: Ethical reasoning, creativity, and venturing efficacy.
• Community needs: Brain gain, economic vitality, and sustainability.
• Scholarly needs/SUNY Polytechnic needs: Improved Excels (PIP), institutionalization of key experiential learning components, greater research on economic vitality, and more students engaged in venturing.