Overview | Jockey Club Design Institute for Social Innovation

Vision & Mission

To become a leading institute to trigger social innovation in all dimensions of the society to improve the well-being of the community and people.

To provide an innovative and human-centred platform to ENVISION a better life in the society, to CONNECT people with passion and NURTURE doers of all ages to INNOVATE with collective wisdom to ENABLE impactful action.

Objectives

Through trans-disciplinary research and extensive collaboration with stakeholders within and outside this University, JCDISI aims at creating the visible impacts.

1. Social Impact

To facilitate proactive policy advocacy and implementation of workable solutions on social issues.

2. Academic Impact

To facilitate world-class empirical and applied research on unique Hong Kong issues through trans-disciplinary effort and collaboration with entrepreneurs, designers, professionals, technologists, intellectuals, community leaders and stakeholders within and outside PolyU.

3. Knowledge Transfer

To organize seminars, symposia, community engagement projects and publication of case reports on successful JCDISI projects for promoting and nurturing a positive and forward-looking community mindset for collaboration and social innovation.

Beliefs and Strategies

The core functions of a university are knowledge creation and knowledge transfer. We believe that J.C.DISI can contribute to these core functions by a strategy of maintaining an optimal balance of social innovation research and social innovation practice.

We believe that in a shared world, social innovation should be an open process which enables wide participation of various stakeholders. Participatory social innovation would be the overarching strategy of J.C.DISI in developing all our research and practice projects to enable multi-faceted community engagement and multi-disciplinary collaboration.

Splitting views and interests in a complex city like Hong Kong are unavoidable but we believe that the civic society can build consensus based on openness and reasonableness. J.C.DISI can contribute to consensus building with a strategy of promoting an open, creative, rational and action-oriented social innovation process which can mobilize the community’s positive resources and enhance the community’s problem-solving capacity.

We believe that benefits of social innovation should be made tangible and sustainable. This can be realized by a strategy of stressing the importance of actualizing short-term results to benefit the community and long-term achievements of system changes to sustain the positive impacts.