How can universities more effectively address complex real-world problems, especially in sustainable development? What’s needed is not only disciplinary expertise, but also an ability to deal with systems problems involving wicked dynamic interrelations and a diversity of stakeholders, with varying levels of power to design and implement solutions. Researchers need to interact with a diversity of actors, inside and outside the academic community and to take into account diverse mental frameworks, languages, cultures and interests.
The Innovation and Technology for Development Centre at the Technical University of Madrid (itdUPM)
A growing number of faculty members at the Technical University of Madrid have sought to address this challenge, leading to the creation in March 2012 of the Innovation and Technology for Development Centre (itdUPM).
The Centre’s main characteristics are:
Its aim of contributing to the solution of sustainability problems through both collaborative research and postgraduate problem-oriented education, involving students from diverse disciplines
Voluntary affiliation of university faculty members and researchers to itdUPM, with more than 200 currently holding joint appointments or multiple affiliations between departments or research groups and itdUPM. A faculty member will undertake teaching duties for their department, disciplinary research within their research group, and action-focused research on sustainable development problems with members of the itdUPM network
Affiliates also include non-academic professionals and experts with a record of collaboration with itdUPM and its working groups
The Centre is organized as a network
Teams are not permanent and they are established as task forces of varying durations.
The Centre’s organization is represented in the figure below. The circles represent the network’s nodes:
Management Committee (19 lecturers and coordinators of Research Groups and PhD holders)
Standing Committees (working under the Management Committee to speed up processes and programmes)
Communities of Knowledge and Practices (communities focus on different disciplines)
Technical Team (fulfills the enabler node function composed by a group of individuals dedicated exclusively to itdUPM).
