Amy Li, Campus Editor for the Daily Northwestern
November 14, 2019

The Buffett Institute for Global Affairs will launch its first Idea Incubation Workshop this weekend from Nov. 15-17.

The institute plans to hold Idea Incubation Workshops annually to bring together Northwestern faculty across a number of disciplines with multiple forms of expertise to solve a select number of global issues that align with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.

Annelise Riles, director of The Buffett Institute, described the institute’s new approach to research and problem-solving is “open, transparent, and collaborative.”

“The new genius is really a collaborative genius, not an individual genius,” Riles said. “Our task at Northwestern Buffett is to incubate those teams and provide the space for people to work together across disciplines and across schools in a way that they don’t have the opportunity to do elsewhere in the university.”

The Idea Incubation Workshop is the second stage of the institute’s three-step approach to determining which contemporary problems will be researched and how funding will be allocated. The first stage, “Idea Dialogues,” involves bringing faculty together for lunches to broadly explore ideas and how academics can collaboratively work towards them.

The upcoming Idea Incubation Workshop will allow researchers to form thematic groups, or “Idea Streams,” to determine a plan for collaborative research and who could be included in each project.

The workshop spanning the upcoming weekend will look at proposals for three “Idea Streams” — “Censorship, Propaganda, and Persecution of Journalists,” “Palliative Care in Humanitarian Crises,” and “Disproportionate Impacts of Environmental Challenges.”