The Rob Walton College of Global Futures to advance Principled Innovation in new transnational capstone course
Datu Buyung Agusdinata, Associate Professor, School of Sustainability in the Rob Walton College of Global Futures, Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory, is co-investigator with Kris Hartley, Assistant Professor, School of Sustainability, on Energy Transitions in ASEAN: Systems, Policy and Innovation, a new $8,000 grant awarded by Rob Walton College of Global Futures Principled Innovation Research and Teaching Grant.
Says Buyung Agusdinata: This new capstone course will introduce students to Principled Innovation as a lived practice, going beyond solution-oriented thinking and more toward an integrated perspective on principled and purpose-driven innovation, so students are prepared to be responsible and empathetic leaders and innovators in real-world situations. Through multinational collaborations, students will practice Principled Innovation to analyze how energy transition decisions affect diverse stakeholders, evaluate tradeoffs among competing values, reflect on their own assumptions and responsibilities, and develop energy transition proposals that explicitly address ethical and distributional issues.
A brief summary follows:
Energy transitions in Southeast Asia are one of the most consequential sustainability challenges of the coming decades. The region is experiencing rapid economic growth, rising energy demand, and mounting environmental pressures. These transitions are not purely technical. They require reflective policymaking to navigate tradeoffs among social equity, economic development, political sovereignty, and climate goals. This capstone course addresses this critical gap in sustainability education: the need to prepare students to engage with complex, value-laden governance systems in global contexts. Through a Principled Innovation lens, this course integrates systems thinking, public policy, economics, and technology to examine complex energy transition challenges such as regional electricity interconnection, sustainable palm oil production, and electric vehicle deployment. Grounded in the Principled Innovation framework, the course positions energy transitions as inherently ethical and value-laden processes requiring reflective judgment, relational interactions, and civic responsibility.
Buyung Agusdinata offers the following acknowledgments:
The Rob Walton College of Global Futures, ASU Office of University Affairs