Vision and Mission

Our vision

Our ‘studying and doing’ ethos combines clarifying and reconfiguring problems with proposing socially inclusive and ecologically sustainable development pathways for global governance institutions and aid agencies, national governments, industry, and civil society.

Our mission and objectives

With our teaching and research, we aim to understand, support, and intervene in processes of socio-technical innovation and transformation.

The ethos that underpins our work is that it is action-oriented and reflexive. We both study societal challenges, debates and change processes and intervene in these processes in reflexive and socially inclusive ways. The transformative potential of knowledge and technology on society, and vice versa, are perceived as two sides of a co-production process.

Through working with stakeholders at an early stage, we develop, apply, and critically reflect on innovation processes to help shape and adjust technological and social innovation, so that it becomes embedded in society in a fair and accountable way.

Our group

Our group is uniquely positioned at Wageningen University & Research (WUR), given the importance of knowledge, technology, and innovation in societal transformations across WUR domains of food, health, and environment. We offer an interdisciplinary environment, actively seeking collaboration with groups in other life science domains and contributes to the University’s ambition to improve the quality of life. We engage with diverse international networks of scholars and house a community of international PhD candidates, many of whom come from the global south.

KTI houses a vibrant and collaborative team acquiring substantive research funding and developing a strong international and interdisciplinary orientation in research and education that connects social science perspectives on knowledge, technology, and innovation to both the natural and technical sciences and practice. Group members contribute to international scientific networks in the fields of cross-sector collaboration, development studies, ethnobiology, evaluation, technology and innovation studies, sustainable development and transitions. The Group and the PhD community are highly international and most of the courses of the Group are taught in English.