About Cognitive Innovation

Cognitive Innovation is a theoretical framework that describes the nested, dynamic, evolving relationship between living organisms and their environment. It is concerned with creativity, adaptation, and evolution along multiple scales of organization "from cell to society" (Gummerum and Denham, 2014). Cognitive innovation can be understood as "a recursive process in which an individual probes its boundaries to seek out new knowledge, selects promising avenues for more extensive exploitation, and synthesizes what it learns within its growing body of knowledge, which includes knowledge of how to act in the world and how to interact with other individuals" (Denham and Punt, 2017). It draws from a range of theories, approaches, and disciplines: psychology, neuroscience, education, the arts, humanities, philosophy, design, computational sciences, anthropology, biology, cybernetics, autopoeisis, and systems theory.