The Institute for Innovative Study (IIS) has a very direct and succinct set of objectives.
To encourage, support and sustain:
- Independent, creative, innovative basic research
- Understanding of complex questions and development of new models, hypotheses and theories
- Discovery of ways to link such research to specific useful and feasible applications that can solve
critical problems facing humanity and the ecosystem of planet Earth
Practically speaking, these objectives can be met through an intelligently organized and managed environment
that supports and facilitates, simultaneously and in parallel:
- independent, individually sponsored research, conducted by specialists and innovators from academia, industry,
the public sector, and private life
- team projects involving multiple and often interdisciplinary, complementary experts and outstanding "bright stars"
of all ages, specialties, and diversities who are brought together in a common drivwe to discover and to innovate,
both theoretically and with a view to pragmatic results and applications
- deliberately not excluding persons with remarkable qualities and abilities who may be "non-academic", and specifically,
members of our youthful and our senior populations, especially persons who have had real-world experience to complement the
"bright ideas" of theorists and academicians
- collaborations that may in principle be multi-generational, not unlike the creation of great cathedrals, for which
there must be long-term planning, long-term sponsorship and support, and acknowledgement that the problems and tasks of
research can require much more than one lifetime but much more than a brief and informal collaboration
The Institute welcomes new ideas and constructive criticism as it moves forward.
A foundational element for building and sustaining the Institute, and in fact an experimental "platform" in the sense of
demonstrating effective, economical, self-sustainable basic research and application development, is
LEAPS,
the Laboratory for Emergent Adaptive Processes and Systems.
