Katharine McGowan

Dr. KatharineMcGowan is Associate Professor of Social Innovation at Mount Royal University. Katharine began her academic career as a traditional Canadian historian - and this eventually led her to be the annoying fact-checker and long-term perspective haver on social innovation at the Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation and Resilience. Her clear joy in public speaking and mild likeability led to a position with Social Prosperity Wood Buffalo (SPWB), a community-based project in Fort McMurray that sought to support a culture of social innovation. This directly led to her current position as Assistant Professor of Social Innovation in the Bissett School of Business.

She has not abandoned her historical roots however, as she is currently delivering a first - a history of/and social innovation course, where she has already subjected serious business students to a frivolous discussion of resilience, the Black Death and Industrialization.

In an effort to find a platform for complexity (and redirect her from esoterica), Katharine is deeply involved in Map the System, a systems thinking challenge that allows students to explore wicked problems of their own choosing. This anti-pitch style mixed curricular and co-curricular space helps students discover surprising emergence, connect relationships and outcomes, and embrace the messiness we so often artificially smooth in favour of easier answers.