Mission and Goals

The Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation (WICI) facilitates transdisciplinary and collaborative research promoting innovation and resilience within— and beneficial transformation of— the complex adaptive systems at the core of human well being in the 21st century.

Under this overarching mission, WICI aims to:

1. Pursue leading-edge research that significantly advances complexity science and its practical application to humanity’s problems;
2. Create a vigorous university-wide research community in the field of complexity and innovation studies;
3. Link this community through research projects and exchange of knowledge with the global complexity-science community; and,
4. Establish the University of Waterloo as a world leader in efforts to use complex-systems ideas to promote innovation to solve multi-scale, systems-level global problems.

Within the University of Waterloo, WICI acts as a “centre of centres” for research on complex systems. Within southern Ontario, WICI activities bring together scholars, practitioners, and policy makers working on both theoretical and applied complex systems problems. Beyond the immediate geographic scope of Southern Ontario, WICI uses online and interactive technologies to disseminate its findings and to engage vigorously with complexity researchers around the world.