SUNY Polytechnic’s Joint Center for Creativity, Design, and Venturing (JCCDV) invites your participation in Visioneers and Venturers, a conference bringing together a diverse community of scholars, practitioners, and students to explore connections among humanistic inquiry, arts and design, and entrepreneurship.
The conference is open to both those who would like to present their work and those who want to simply attend, engage, and learn. Presentations can represent early-stage, formative work or later-stage research, practices, and creations. We seek contributions that open new directions or that integrate across fields in ways that help to reimagine and re-envision entrepreneurship.
We begin with the terms visioneer and venturer--not as absolute, hermetic categories, but as starting points to place ourselves in these intellectual, creative, and entrepreneurial discussions, and to seek contact, cross-fertilization, and development. The meeting may result in the emergence of new terms and paradigms, but to start:
- Visioneer: Do you see yourself as a visioneer; defining, appreciating, and developing insights and understandings of the world’s past, present, and future through humanities and fine arts scholarship and practice? Would you like to do so in dialogue with entrepreneurs and educators?
- Venturer: Do you see yourself as a venturer; developing scholarship on or participating in the founding and sustaining of innovative and ethical entrepreneurial organizations that create economic, social, cultural, and personal value? Would you like to do so in dialogue with fine arts and design practitioners, and humanities [and social science] scholars?
The Visioneers and Venturers conference will result in the generation and dissemination of scholarship, action research, pedagogies, and other lines of inquiry in the form of peer-reviewed, open access publications, in print and online platforms, following the conference.
Though fine arts and design practitioners, humanities scholars, and entrepreneurial practitioners and scholars are often siloed into separate educational, financial, and social institutions, such arbitrary divisions can be bridged by interdisciplinary connectivity among the Humanities, Arts, and Management. Visioneers and venturers share not only common interests in complex problems and uncertainties, but three core unifying ideas that are foundational to address them:
- CREATIVITY:
which has traditionally been a subject of the humanities through its focus on the diversity of creative expression across cultures and histories and engagement of students in developing their own creative thinking capacities. Recently, behavioral and management research has studied the cognitive and social processes of creativity.
- VENTURING:
which has traditionally been the domain of management studies and refers to entrepreneurial activity essential to launching startup organizations. Our approach situates venturing as a way of making change and creating not only economic value, but social, cultural, and personal value. Calls for bringing humanities into the workplace emerged several generations ago but have not been pursued, and the urgency of doing so is more acute than ever.
- ETHICS:
which reflects the humanities’ role in helping re-imagine entrepreneurship and economic life with a shift towards an "economy of contribution". This cultivates reflection on personal and social values and critical awareness of how values are embedded in human actions and creations.
Together, the humanities and arts can encourage envisioning the future and cultivates ethical judgement while the field of leading and managing organizations can advance effective leadership and fosters the application of "know how" for successful venturing.
Collectively, we refer to them as Visioneers and Venturers, and invite you to join this endeavor.
Conference Tracks
Please consider submitting your work to one of the following conference tracks. Does your work focus on:
- Reimagining entrepreneurship and ethical venturing:
Transforming concepts and ideas into fundable and sustainable ventures by teaming with others to craft and pitch business plans for new entrepreneurial ventures which are "gap-narrowing" and yield social impact.
- Creativity and design culture:
Expressing creativity, and/or gaining an understanding of the significance of creativity and creative expression within the context of contemporary society. Developing insights into the nature and means by which instrumental creativity and novelty generation are socially fostered through collective bodies such as diverse groups, organizations, and communities
- Experiential and applied pedagogy:
Fostering in classroom and continuing/community educational ventures: Ethical reasoning, creativity, and venturing efficacy among students, brain gain, economic vitality, and sustainability in your community, institutionalization of key experiential learning components, greater research on economic vitality, and more students engaged in venturing at your institution.
- Interdisciplinary research:
Seeking to analyze complex issues, questions and problems through individual and collaborative interdisciplinary inquiry and developing a holistic understanding of the issues. Applying rigorous, integrated methodologies for engaging diverse stakeholders to immersively frame and innovatively solve complex social problems.
For any additional questions or concerns, please feel free to contact this email: info@vvconfernce.org
