The world, as we know it, is continually transformed by rapid shifts in technology, dwindling natural resources, and ever-fluctuating human dynamics. Change is the only constant. Dwindling natural resources and the uncertainty of our global climate forces us to face limits. Limits disrupt our status quo, which triggers a need for reflexive thinking.

My research is focused on a practice-based approach to emergent innovative knowledge-creation through collaboration – the endless cycle of mutually interactive processes that create new outcomes, new practices, new relationships, and new ways to approach the relationships, practices, and outcomes. LAUNCH is my case study. LAUNCH is a non-traditional public-private partnership between NASA, USAID, State Department, and Nike to search for and identify transformative solutions to sustainability problems facing humanity on and off the planet. LAUNCH is, in essence, a collaborative testbed for innovative thinking, as we solicit collaborators from diverse backgrounds, disciplines, and expertise to engage with us, as participants of the LAUNCH Collective Genius. LAUNCH is a fluid, evolving, co-creation of new ways of knowing through a collaborative community of practice – a case of new knowledge-creationthrough collaboration.

For the purposes of this research, practice in defined as collective action, transaction, and interaction.  From this viewpoint, knowledge is created in the context of interactive participation – the practice of activity. A practice-based approach offers a new epistemology where the "world appears to be relationally constituted, as a seamless web of heterogeneous elements kept together and perpetuated by active processes of ordering and sense making" (Nicolini, Gheranrdi Yanow 2003: 27).

The practice of collaboration represents infinite opportunities to innovate our thinking. Interactive collaborative processes create new outcomes, new practices, new relationships, as well as new ways to approach the relationships, practices, and outcomes  – as we've experienced with LAUNCH.  Not all collaborative undertakings, however, result in positive outcomes. New knowledge creation can be messy and uncomfortable. The practice of strategy renewal and technological innovation is most often in response to uncertainty, stagnation, tension, disruption, conflict. We’re forced to get creative when we can't get where we want to go. If someone or something stands in the way, we find new ways around, under, over, or through barriers or obstructions. Collectively, we have so many more options available than we do alone, as we've learned through the LAUNCH experience. LAUNCH has become an innovative knowledge-creation community of practice – the Collective Genius for a Better World.

Our LAUNCH team came together to collaboratively search for game-changing sustainability solutions for life on and off our planet. What we discovered along the way was that the innovations weren't the only outcome. The collective genius of the experts we brought together to solve these problems – the LAUNCH team, LAUNCH council, and LAUNCH innovators – was an innovation itself, along with the LAUNCH processes we developed to identify and select the LAUNCH innovators. We discovered, in the "practice" of LAUNCH, that the world of innovation is always in the making.