Cambridge Centre for Resilience and Sustainable Development

Background

At the Centre for Resilience and Sustainable Development CRSD we bring together leaders from the public, private and third sectors with academic thought leaders to create robust new, workable solutions to some of the world’s most complex challenges. We use tools and innovative techniques which cut across systems, organisational and behavioural science.

Our research and robust tools support stakeholders to co-create sustainable and resilient solutions in the following areas:

• Sustainable Investment – bringing together investors, investees and regulators to identify and share best practices that drive sustainable investment.
• Good Governance – we co-create policies and strategies for systems changes to identify power relationships and institutional formats to make them work. We test intended and unintended consequences to improve outcomes.
• Responsible Innovation – we help to support and accelerate leadership and business models which support key transitional initiatives across global value chains.

Technology overview

We are dedicated to transdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research, as well as ‘action research’  to utilise cutting edge analysis and project design to deliver effective, transformative and resilient outcomes for governments and industry.

We highly value experiential knowledge, viewing it as a valuable asset in the action-research process. We also believe that training practitioners in systems based thinking is an important part of our role as researchers.

CRSD has developed, tested and refined a broad range of impact-driven frameworks and methodologies, research methods and tools that we use, alongside more conventional social science research methods, to deliver research project outcomes and support leaders to make better decisions. These tools include:

Cambridge Policy Boot Camp – to speed up the policy and strategy ideation process.

Cambridge Policy Simulation Lab – to quickly and effectively prototype policy and strategy concepts to determine their political and institutional feasibility.

Cambridge Sustainable Investment Markets (9SIMS) – to holistically and quickly analyse the ESG journey of a company using visualisation tools.

Creative Ideas Studio – to provide a safe environment for leaders to reimagine the future, using techniques drawn from executive leadership coaching.

We deliver our research and activities through a variety of workshops and outputs tailored to specific needs of partners. This includes workshops, seminars, courses, academic papers, challenge notes, case studies, in-depth project reports and blogs.

Benefits

Our research and activities enables:

• Decision makers to understand the complexity of the systems within which they work.
• Collaboration between stakeholders to pool knowledge and experience in order to create better solutions to complex problems using processes that are faster, cheaper, more comprehensive and more inclusive.
• Provides a pathway for leaders and strategists, policy makers to tap into cutting edge transdisciplinary and systems based research and make it relevant to addressing their own challenges and opportunities.

Founders

Dr Nazia Mintz Habib, FRSA, Founder and Director at the Centre for Resilience and Sustainable Development (CRSD)

Dr Nazia Mintz Habib holds appointments at the Department of Engineering and Department of Land Economy. Dr Habib has dedicated her scholarship to develop twenty-first century action-research methodologies that will harness the power of collective intelligence, smart technologies, and open innovation to help improve the decision-making process.

Website

CRSD

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