Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to the second episode of the Why Why Why podcast by Social Marie.
Speaker: This episode is very special.
Speaker: We begin with an amazing conversation about business models and social entrepreneurship.
Speaker: We talk about burnout and we end up with a fascinating interview where we touch topics like artificial intelligence and innovation.
Speaker: I really hope this episode fills your mind with inspiration.
Speaker: My name is Anna Misovits.
Speaker: I have a three months old baby and a two and a half year old son.
Speaker: I love to do do-it-yourself stuff like knitting, crocheting or macrameing.
Speaker: or writing, singing, playing the piano.
Speaker: I live in Vienna, but I was born in Budapest and moved here as a child.
Speaker: And I was working for Sozialmari for eight years now, but I am on maternity leave at the moment.
Speaker: Thank you, Ana.
Speaker: Without you, this podcast would not be real today.
Speaker: Ana, as a project manager on Social Marie, has an immense experience and perspective on social entrepreneurship, social impact, social innovation.
Speaker: Dear Ana, what brought you here?
Speaker: Firstly, I was really excited about the whole podcast because we were developing it together for a while and thinking about it together for a while.
Speaker: And I was, to be honest, somehow curious to also be on it.
Speaker: But it wouldn't have to be this time.
Speaker: Why it's this time?
Speaker: Maybe it's because we were talking about the first episode and I listened to it while I was taking a stroll with my baby and I recorded a voice message to you in a windy surrounding, letting you know what I was thinking about it and how great I thought the first episode became.
Speaker: True.
Speaker: In the past episode, Jiva Anjovi talked about the importance of business modeling, especially in social innovation ventures.
Speaker: And you have seen so many initiatives and so many winners participating in the Social Marie competition.
Speaker: So I'm completely sure that you have
Speaker: An interesting perspective to share about the importance of business models.
Speaker: Yeah, it's complicated to sum it up in one way, I think, because the projects are so different contexts and countries and regions.
Speaker: What I see or what I observed a couple of times is that people doing these social projects or innovative projects kind of struggle to, quote unquote, make money because people
Speaker: the social realm is not something that you can make a lot of money from.
Speaker: So it's not their fault that they don't find anything there to make money from, but it's also our society and the context that does not give a big monetary value on social services.
Speaker: And I think what they struggle with is that they are looking in this realm to find something that can be economically beneficial for their project, while if they would look a little bit outside of that context and maybe not think about how can we attract financiers or big companies to support our project, but rather
Speaker: Is there a part in our activities?
Speaker: Is there a skill set we can offer that people will pay for and not directly to run their project, but to gain some funds?
Speaker: And I have the feeling that some have it a little bit, it's easier for them to find that something to monetize while in other contexts and for other issues projects work on, it's really hard because it's a societal imbalance that leads to not valuing that work as much as it should be.
Speaker: And when we talk about organizations that are successful, what have you seen?
Speaker: So do they have something in common?
Speaker: What they have in common is that they
Speaker: maintain somehow their vision while failing a lot and adjust their vision or their activities to a changing environment.
Speaker: And of course, some projects are more successful because they have a bigger organization behind them.
Speaker: So the organization provides not just financial resources, but also other resources to grow a project.
Speaker: But if it's not that kind of a background,
Speaker: I have the feeling it's often very passionate individuals who have the ability to mobilize a lot of other people and to somehow create a vision that makes other people want to join them and work with them and who also think a little bit outside of the box and somehow touch a point in society that needs attention and where people also want to pay attention to.
Speaker: What you are saying is that successful organizations are not only focusing on the results or the achievements they want to get, but they also pay special attention in building a system that is sustainable, that is self-sustaining.
Speaker: Am I right?
Speaker: Is that a correct assessment?
Speaker: Yeah, I would say that's true, yeah.
Speaker: There's something additional that I observed that is that directly from receiving a training on business modeling, it is easy to confuse that the business model as the result of the training course is just a superficial understanding of what the business is about.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And I've seen organizations or new ventures bringing those business models as if they were, uh, uh, the holy grail.
Speaker: Instead, organizations that tend to succeed go far beyond the business model itself.
Speaker: They go deep into finding out what does it mean to make their organization successful, funded, and self-sustaining.
Speaker: Would you agree with that?
Speaker: I agree and I would also say it's from my point of view or what I observed during the years, those types of business doers that you described who focus more on the business model also and then the impact as well, but not solely on the impact.
Speaker: So that the business doers that focus more on the business models
Speaker: They come from an environment of incubators.
Speaker: They have a starting point that is already a bit more, a bit better, so to say, or has more resources.
Speaker: They managed to get into an incubator program or they have studied economics and come from that field while they're
Speaker: other projects that rather expect the world to pay attention to the social benefit they achieve and also somehow fund that, these people are more likely social workers or people who are activists or working communities and really focus on making circumstances better for disadvantaged group of people.
Speaker: So that's what I observe.
Speaker: Also what I heard or observed when we were doing the research for the TRIG project we are doing or we were doing this Erasmus funded little project we were doing with Cromo Foundation is that women in
Speaker: on maternity leave or after maternity leave while they still cannot go back to work even half time.
Speaker: That in this time while they are actually preoccupied with raising kids, they start to find some kind of other goal they feel they need to work on and develop really great projects, which I find actually very curious because
Speaker: It's a lot of work raising kids full time and it's something that also is not valued as much as it should be in my opinion.
Speaker: And it's interesting that some of these women then find a different type of work, which then is also very female connotated from society in a way, you know, doing good for somebody or some groups that are disadvantaged.
Speaker: I understand entrepreneurship as a process and it is a process that takes a long time.
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: In my case, I began as an IT person for more than 10 years, I think 15 years.
Speaker: And then I decided to switch to social entrepreneurship.
Speaker: And during those years, I've went through a lot of stuff, so ups and downs.
Speaker: investing more money and energy than I had available, struggling here and there, failing, learning from the failures, getting to know myself much better, becoming a different person until I found the moment
Speaker: where I could integrate these two aspects of myself, right?
Speaker: So one of them was the social entrepreneur and the other one was the IT guy.
Speaker: A process of 10 years and
Speaker: Now I'm finally able to see that, uh, getting a balance.
Speaker: Uh, so the distance between the ups and downs is each time smaller, uh, becomes much easier.
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: So thinking about that, thinking about the process of entrepreneurship.
Speaker: What would you recommend anyone that wants to begin as a social entrepreneur, as a social impact entrepreneur, as a social innovator?
Speaker: Well, firstly, I would recommend to look at our results from the TRIG project because we developed very vast learning material on skills needed to do social innovations.
Speaker: So I would recommend that.
Speaker: It will be on our homepage.
Speaker: Secondly,
Speaker: I would recommend to be patient because social impact takes a long time.
Speaker: It's not something that works over, as you said, over a short period of time.
Speaker: Very often the societal transformation that we seek by doing social innovations or
Speaker: projects that have social impact or social businesses are not visible right after we started our activities.
Speaker: And if we define social innovation by something that leads to social change or social transformation, then it even takes longer because social transformation also means that certain structures change for good.
Speaker: I also would recommend to be aware that it's not like you are one actor in a big piece, so you can achieve a lot, but we are in a system that also neglects these types of activities or works, like it's...
Speaker: A lot of things social innovators do could be done by a political system, by the state, you know, if the state would provide more social services, if society would be more fair, we would not need these social innovative projects.
Speaker: So I would recommend to be aware that you
Speaker: You are an actor in that system, in that context, and your activities will lead to change, but also cannot somehow, how do you say, make up for the lack of attention, right?
Speaker: a big society, um, has on certain issues.
Speaker: And, and also, um, yeah, I would also recommend to be sturdy because, um,
Speaker: People from your field may give you positive feedback, but I also feel that a lot of others don't and you need to believe in yourself that what you do is good and important because you might otherwise get frustrated.
Speaker: I would recommend to be persistent.
Speaker: Because being socially innovative or active in that field is often not recognized as an important or worthwhile activity.
Speaker: And also the system we live in, the society we live in, or societies we live in, very often do not...
Speaker: And want to create a good path for you or an easy path for you, being persistent and altering your tools and learning new skills to achieve your goal is, I think, important and definitely good to have.
Speaker: Once I asked a group of, um, professors, business professors, why did we invent the practice of business?
Speaker: And after a lot of discussions, they concluded that the reason why we do business is to support ourselves and support society to develop ourselves and to be better.
Speaker: Social entrepreneurship.
Speaker: is not different.
Speaker: So we do social entrepreneurship, social innovation to solve problems.
Speaker: And that means that we should consider that our practice should never sacrifice our health and our mental health.
Speaker: In a research led by the Social Impact Award and the University of Vienna at the Faculty of Economics and Business, found that over 40% of social entrepreneurs experienced some level of burnout.
Speaker: So please keep this in mind.
Speaker: We don't need to burn out in order to save others.
Speaker: We need to be okay to help others to be well.
Speaker: Business modeling is essential for entrepreneurship, but what about innovation?
Speaker: Isn't that another of these concepts that are a bit tricky and difficult to understand?
Speaker: What is the process of innovation?
Speaker: How can we build organizations that focus on innovative approaches?
Speaker: My friend, Veronika Iannirova, cares about innovation and many other topics.
Speaker: And this time, she got the opportunity of speaking with university professor Markus Peschel.
Speaker: He is an Austrian cognitive scientist, philosopher of mind, philosopher of science, and researcher on innovation.
Speaker: He is professor for cognitive science and philosophy of science at the University of Vienna in Austria.
Speaker: Veronica, the floor is yours.
Speaker: Hi, Marcus.
Speaker: We are quite curious to learn about your various approaches to the process of innovation.
Speaker: Could you tell us something a bit about your personal journey, intellectual journey?
Speaker: Okay, my intellectual journey.
Speaker: I actually started with a school which was rather humanistic, but then for my studies, I turned to computer science.
Speaker: I studied at the University of Vienna, the Technical University of Vienna.
Speaker: Computer sciences was back in the 1980s, 1985 approximately, plus minus.
Speaker: At that time, computer science was still a little bit, of course, not esoteric, but it was
Speaker: Not every day, but at the same time, I already studied in parallel here at the University of Vienna, some psychology, some philosophy, actually meteorology, biology.
Speaker: This was still possible there because nowadays we have to be quite straightforward with studying.
Speaker: And then I finished my studies, made my PhD, and already during the end of my studies, I turned into the field of artificial intelligence and more specifically into neural networks, which is now like the big hype when we talk about chat GPD and these kinds of things.
Speaker: So already then, this was like 30 years ago, I did a lot of
Speaker: theoretical research on these things.
Speaker: And there, my interest started to grow into the question of, you know, what is cognition?
Speaker: What is knowledge?
Speaker: How do we learn?
Speaker: And these kinds of things.
Speaker: So I started to study or to engage in cognitive science.
Speaker: And for my postdoc, I was then in the United States at UCSD, so this is in San Diego, University of California in San Diego, which was at that time that place to be for cognitive science or for neural networks.
Speaker: And there I learned again, you know, a lot of philosophy, neuroscience, and of course, computer science, these kinds of things.
Speaker: And yes, then I came back to Vienna and started here at the Technical University and then at the University of Vienna and got more and more into cognitive science.
Speaker: And actually what we did here is we established a cognitive science program and a lot of research, a whole research.
Speaker: Now it's called Vienna Cognitive Science Hub.
Speaker: Approximately 15 years ago, I started to get interesting in the question of how does novelty come about?
Speaker: How does innovation come about?
Speaker: What is innovation?
Speaker: And how are we as humans, how can we be creative?
Speaker: So this is most like the things which I did for the last 15 years.
Speaker: Now I'm here and doing research mainly in the fields of innovation, of how innovation is related with cognitive science and how organizations have to be designed so that they become more innovative.
Speaker: So that's very, very, very briefly.
Speaker: One thing, we are also interested very much in the question of
Speaker: how what we call enabling spaces, how do you have to design spaces, but not only physical spaces, but in general, organizational spaces so that these organizations or the people living there or working there can get more innovative and get supported in their knowledge work.
Speaker: You mentioned the emphasis on cognitive science.
Speaker: Could you tell us in which way did cognitive science help you to understand innovation or innovation processes?
Speaker: What can you learn from cognitive sciences?
Speaker: I think it's crucial because normally when they think about innovation, most people think about technology or some economic stuff.
Speaker: So this is like the main focus on innovation nowadays.
Speaker: But in the end, when you look very closely, in the end, it's always people or humans who are innovative.
Speaker: So if you want to understand innovation,
Speaker: At least to my understanding, one perspective, which I think is very important, is to say, okay, what kind of cognitive processes are responsible for bringing forth novelty?
Speaker: How are we creative?
Speaker: How can we create some kind of novel knowledge and how can we bring this knowledge into the world?
Speaker: And this is a core business under quotes of cognitive science.
Speaker: Cognitive science is studying cognitive processes.
Speaker: It's studying the relationship with the world.
Speaker: It's studying how do we engage with the world?
Speaker: How do we produce artifacts in the world?
Speaker: How do we produce, you know,
Speaker: interactions, social interactions, how is culture involved in the whole thing.
Speaker: So in that way, cognitive science is at the very core, if you want to understand what innovation is about.
Speaker: And now from your experience and also expertise, what would you consider the main ingredients for a, let's say, successful innovation process?
Speaker: What are the main ingredients in your view?
Speaker: It depends on where you look, I think.
Speaker: From this people perspective.
Speaker: From a cognitive perspective, I think
Speaker: There are lots of things, but I think one of the key ingredients or key sources of innovation is like question of attitude or a question of mindset.
Speaker: In the end, at least to my understanding of innovation, it's very much about openness and receptivity.
Speaker: So this means that in order to be innovative or creative,
Speaker: you first of all have to be open or receptive to what is out there in the world.
Speaker: What do you find out there and what can you do with this world?
Speaker: How can this inspire your own thinking, your own perhaps also emotions, but your own creativity so that you can bring forth something novel?
Speaker: So in that sense, I would say this seems to be one of the core things.
Speaker: And of course, this is very somehow fluffy, but it's something which you can also train.
Speaker: So it's not something which you say, okay, we're just talking about openness.
Speaker: It's nice.
Speaker: Yes, I'm open now.
Speaker: But yes, somehow, but in the end, it's very much about
Speaker: What kind of attitude towards the world, towards your other people, towards your culture, whatever is around you, do you have?
Speaker: And are you able to train this kind of openness with various techniques, methods, and so on?
Speaker: Now, if you think about the organization as such, what are the main features or characteristics an organization should have to facilitate or to help this process?
Speaker: The previous question was about the individual dimension.
Speaker: Now, we are talking about the organizational or the social dimension.
Speaker: Again, here it is somewhere between skills on the one hand and culture.
Speaker: I think this is what is, or mindsets on the other hand.
Speaker: And here again, you know, it is, of course, it's no surprise.
Speaker: It's again about openness or like how receptive is the organization as a whole to the world.
Speaker: And the question is, how do you realize that?
Speaker: And so this is a cultural issue and there are many things like, does this organization understand itself as a learning organization, for instance?
Speaker: How are we dealing with errors?
Speaker: How are we dealing with things which don't fit into our expectations or into our hypothesis about the world?
Speaker: I consider an organization as a living organism, or as a cognitive organism as a whole,
Speaker: which has some hypothesis about the world.
Speaker: Whenever we are producing something, be it a physical product, a service, or a social service, in your case, it might in many cases, I guess, be social support or social services.
Speaker: people working there individually, but also collectively always have some hypotheses.
Speaker: They have some kind of, how should I say, world view on what the world is supposed to be out there and what they are providing it for or what they're providing for.
Speaker: And that is something which you have to question at some times, because if you want to innovate, you have to break up
Speaker: these mental patterns or these mental images.
Speaker: And this seems to be one of the core capabilities of an organization to first of all reflect what is my worldview and then to understand, okay, if this is my worldview, then I'm looking at the world with a specific pattern and what doesn't fit into my pattern doesn't exist.
Speaker: So if you want to be innovative, you have to break these patterns up so that something novel might come into the organization.
Speaker: So this applies both to the individual and to the organization.
Speaker: And so I think this is a key capability.
Speaker: So when we talk about openness, this is one more concrete.
Speaker: thing which an organization has to be capable of.
Speaker: And I think this has a lot to do with culture because in the end, it's very much about, are you allowed to question patterns?
Speaker: Are you allowed to question premises?
Speaker: Are you allowed to reframe whole ways of thinking both individually, but especially on the organizational level?
Speaker: In one of your lectures recently, you emphasized the role of trust, which is like a major ingredient for innovation processes.
Speaker: Why is this the case?
Speaker: Why is trust so important for innovations to evolve?
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: This is an easy but also difficult question, I think, because first of all, we have to see that innovation has at least two dimensions or an innovation process.
Speaker: An innovation process, first of all, is a knowledge process, an epistemological process, and secondly,
Speaker: it is also a social process.
Speaker: And when we are doing innovation, we are negotiating novel meaning.
Speaker: So what we are doing, innovation is, of course, in the end, it's always an individual, but we are always like what we are doing right now.
Speaker: We are going into a kind of dialogue or a discussion, more of a dialogue, and what we try to find out, how do you think about things and how can we break these things up, perhaps.
Speaker: And in order to do it, in order to get into this kind of social interaction, you need to have a trustful atmosphere because if there is no trust, you do not dare saying something which you are not sure of, for instance.
Speaker: So if you have just an intuition, and it might even sound very weird to you at the first moment,
Speaker: So you have to have a lot of trust to somebody else to make that expert to tell this idea or this intuition to somebody else.
Speaker: So this is just a very, very simple example, but it's critical when you look at organizations because in organizations you have in many cases like hierarchical structures, you have power structures and these kinds of things.
Speaker: And if this is a very rigid structure,
Speaker: then people don't dare voicing their intuitions, their perhaps sometimes old ideas or not so interesting, or they think it's not so interesting ideas.
Speaker: So you are losing a lot of potentials which would be there.
Speaker: So in that sense, trust is somehow on the one hand the clue which holds together the organization or is a social system.
Speaker: But at the same time, it's also the driver for driving force or driving innovation.
Speaker: A lot of debates about innovation center around this disruptive innovation mainly, like, I don't know, the car, the mobile phone, electricity, and so on and so forth.
Speaker: And many of these disruptive innovations
Speaker: have been developed and were then basically lying somewhere in a cupboard or sleeping for many years before they really, how to say, crashed the world.
Speaker: Why is this the case?
Speaker: Why do some innovations or some particularly major innovations sleep for such a long time until they... Come to life.
Speaker: Come to life, yes.
Speaker: I think it's quite interesting.
Speaker: This is a really interesting question.
Speaker: This has something to do with what is called the innovation paradox.
Speaker: So let's look, what do you want when you're innovating?
Speaker: The easiest form of innovation is like, okay, I'm doing something, I'm just improving things.
Speaker: This is incremental innovation.
Speaker: This is not what we're talking about here, but actually what you want in most cases is you want to have something which is radical, disruptive, completely new, which you didn't expect.
Speaker: But this has a problem.
Speaker: The problem is exactly what you were saying.
Speaker: This has to do with your question.
Speaker: The problem is that if
Speaker: the level of novelty is too far out, then people don't understand it, technology isn't ready, the organization itself, which is responsible for that, is not ready.
Speaker: The whole culture is not ready and the whole environment, the whole ecosystem around it is not prepared for that.
Speaker: And so this is what is called the innovation paradox.
Speaker: The innovation paradox is
Speaker: that on the one hand you want to have something really far out and at the same time it does not fit into the world.
Speaker: That's why these things are lying around.
Speaker: So turning things around, the critical thing or the challenging thing in that respect is to find exactly this right level.
Speaker: Actually, I think it comes from aesthetics, I'm not sure, from design, a principle which is called the Maya principle.
Speaker: Most advanced yet acceptable.
Speaker: What you're looking for actually, and this is the real challenge, is what is the most advanced idea?
Speaker: but which is still acceptable by the users or by the company or whichever system you're looking at.
Speaker: And if you find this right level, then you are on the winning side, so to speak.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And that's the interesting thing.
Speaker: Of course, this is the real challenge because it's really hard to really hit the right thing.
Speaker: So it's really like finding, it's like kairos.
Speaker: No, it's finding the right thing or developing the right thing at the right time in the right place.
Speaker: So this is like an old Greek concept.
Speaker: And this is exactly what we're talking about here.
Speaker: We have actually, we have talked about the innovations from an individual perspective, from an organizational perspective.
Speaker: And now we are sitting at the University of Vienna at the Faculty of Philosophy.
Speaker: How is it about the innovative, how to say, capabilities of the university itself?
Speaker: I mean, university itself, it's...
Speaker: Theoretically, it's a major hub for the whole society.
Speaker: It's thought to be a major hub of innovations and new ways of thinking and new ways of producing, traveling, living.
Speaker: Why do many innovations remain stuck in the ivory tower of universities?
Speaker: What would be necessary to...
Speaker: exploit or to tap upon the innovations that are being created within, for example, your university?
Speaker: Okay, difficult question, tricky question.
Speaker: First of all, I think a university is really, I think, one of the coolest places to be apart from extreme overloads, especially in administration, these kinds of things.
Speaker: But let's leave that aside for a moment.
Speaker: In a way, I think the original idea of university or of academia, I would say, let's make it a little bit more broad, is to understand the world and to bring forth new ways of looking at the world.
Speaker: I think that's at least my understanding.
Speaker: So on the one hand, this would be innovative or this is innovative or this is already driven by an innovation mindset.
Speaker: So this is one side.
Speaker: The other side is that if you look at the from a systems perspective, like what are the systems or the processes which are like behind science, science has some kind of intrinsic or is intrinsically conservative somehow.
Speaker: This is a very positive thing because you're very cautious not to just make claims which cannot be supported by evidence or by some arguments or whatever you have.
Speaker: But on the other hand, it also limits the way how you are allowed to work.
Speaker: It limits also the way what kind of, I don't know, methods you might use, what kind of experiments you might make, what kind of authors you might use.
Speaker: how you are applying for grants, how you're writing papers, how you evaluate it.
Speaker: It's a whole system which is actually rather conservative.
Speaker: You have to balance somehow,
Speaker: How far do you want to go with your novelty and how far are you allowed to do it so that you're still accepted?
Speaker: In a way, it's similar with this innovation paradox.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: In a way, of course, the university could be, and in many cases is, a place where real novelty might appear, but it's hard to push that through.
Speaker: This is one aspect.
Speaker: The other aspect is this question, why does it stay in the ivory tower?
Speaker: I think this has something to do with university structures and also with, in some cases, also with the self-understanding of scientists.
Speaker: So scientists in many cases, so this is now a very general thing, so it's not for sure not applied everybody, but in many cases, scientists understand themselves as being engaged in basic research.
Speaker: really they burn for the phenomenon which they're interested in and they don't care about what possible applications does it have.
Speaker: I know this is now very black and white, but I think if you have a real fire for what you're doing, then you are very much into the field where you're working.
Speaker: So in that way, there is no particular interest in saying, okay, how can these things be useful for, I don't know, social thing or society, economy or whatever you have.
Speaker: So this is one way and I think universities at least
Speaker: I would say in Austria for sure, that's what I know, but I also know, of course, Europe in many cases are not very much, not yet, I would say, not yet involved very much in what is called this translational research.
Speaker: Apart, of course, of technical universities and more applied universities, but like the good old universities, very much still very much kept in this
Speaker: I would say this academia and this academic processes, which only the whole thing can be subsumed under this term or this concept of third mission.
Speaker: So this is how this university impacts society.
Speaker: And it's only, I think,
Speaker: since perhaps five or ten years, that at least in Austria, okay, this is limitation, at least in Austria, that this aspect has become more important.
Speaker: And I think we are on the rise of that.
Speaker: And I think at least here also at the University of Vienna, for instance, there is an old unit which is just concerned with
Speaker: knowledge transfer, which is concerned with entrepreneurship and these things.
Speaker: But this is still in its very, very infancy.
Speaker: And I think we have to really learn a lot about and also to learn how
Speaker: we can raise the awareness and also the value of these kinds of things for the scientists who are working here.
Speaker: And because at least this is my own experience, because I'm also working in practical project or applied project,
Speaker: This gives you a whole new perspective on your own research in the end, because it really brings what you're doing into the field and you're confronted with completely new problems, but also with new ideas.
Speaker: So this is a way if you really get into this kind of feedback loop, you have your theoretical constructs, then you have your like
Speaker: experimental things, if you do empirical sciences, but you also have the ecological setting or the ecosystem which is around you and are testing or you are co-creating something with whatever your
Speaker: phenomenon or the people you're working with, then this becomes really interesting because suddenly you see on the one hand what is the value of your theoretical things, but also what are the limitations and what can you learn?
Speaker: Now we are back to openness.
Speaker: What can you learn from these unexpected things which you don't find out of the, you know, normally in your lab settings or in your academic settings?
Speaker: I see.
Speaker: So it's an exciting journey to cross the boundaries of your own sector.
Speaker: For sure.
Speaker: I mean, I think in the end, taxpayers are paying here for a lot of money for us as scientists, and that's the least we can do in a way.
Speaker: Professor Markus, I'm very curious about your perspective on artificial intelligence, AGI, in relation with the university.
Speaker: Is something going to change?
Speaker: Is something already changing?
Speaker: We are having huge discussions, endless discussions since the start of when, for instance, JetGPT appeared, I think it was in November 2023.
Speaker: And we immediately started a discussion on that.
Speaker: And we're having, honestly, difficulties in how to deal with it.
Speaker: Because in the end, what we are experiencing here is a, I should say, cognitively semi-autonomous agent
Speaker: with lots of limitations, but still, I would say on a bachelor level with quite some capabilities.
Speaker: And it's really hard if you have an understanding of, I don't know, teaching and learning as a kind of
Speaker: co-creation and the kind of autonomous thinking process where students produce their own thoughts and their own arguments and their own ways of thinking.
Speaker: And it's very hard to, of course, to discriminate whether it's really their own thinking because on that level, on that level of knowledge, which is not too specialized when you're doing a PhD, this is really hard to mimic.
Speaker: Masters level, it's getting a little bit difficult, but on that level, it's really hard to make a clear distinction.
Speaker: Is it now your own thought or the student's thought, or has it been done by a machine?
Speaker: Because the technology has become so advanced and so sophisticated and also creative to some extent.
Speaker: I don't claim that it is fully creative, but it's...
Speaker: For us, it's a real big problem.
Speaker: And in a way, yes, we could go back to very simple, you know, learning by heart tests, but which is complete nonsense in the context of university.
Speaker: So I think what we have to do, we have to change rather into a perspective where, you know, it's about how can we make use of these technologies
Speaker: in our own thinking process.
Speaker: And the current take on that is very much the idea to say we are focusing more on the process of creating our knowledge products
Speaker: rather than only on their results.
Speaker: And to document that and to see how can we make use of these technologies in a more creative manner so that the quality, the overall quality becomes better.
Speaker: But of course, it's always a border
Speaker: We are always dealing here with border cases.
Speaker: And this makes things really difficult because you can even mimic such a process on a meta level.
Speaker: So that's why I think it's really a hard thing.
Speaker: And yeah, that's very briefly.
Speaker: Before publishing this podcast, Professor Marcus reached out to tell us that there is a precision to make.
Speaker: He made a mistake.
Speaker: ChatGPT was launched in 2022, not 2023.
Speaker: Dear Veronica, dear Professor Marcus, thank you so much.
Speaker: Veronica is a research manager with experience in European Union projects, social innovation, and knowledge transfer.
Speaker: She feels at home at the intersection between academia, government agencies, international and civil society organizations.
Speaker: Wouldn't it be amazing if the best practices, experience and knowledge from successful social innovations transform themselves into training programs or training materials that support other people to create competencies?
Speaker: Well, there's a project that did that.
Speaker: It's called TRIC, and that means transferring social innovation into competencies.
Speaker: There's a link in the description under this episode.
Speaker: You can follow it and then load free materials that are really super interesting for anyone is looking for some inspiration.
Speaker: TRIK is an initiative of Sotiel Marie and the Chromo Foundation.
Speaker: The second episode of our podcast, why, why, why is about to end.
Speaker: But before doing that, I would like to leave you with one question to reflect upon.
Speaker: What do you think it takes for a social innovation to become a success?
Speaker: Get yourself a tea or a coffee, buy yourself an amazing chocolate, think about it and take notes.
Speaker: And if you want, share them with us.
Speaker: It would be amazing to know what's your take.
Speaker: This is Jose Antonio Morales, your host, and I'm saying goodbye.
Speaker: I hope you enjoyed.
