About the Institute
Progress toward a flourishing future
Who we are
We are a research network founded in Toronto as a convening group of knowledge creators, organizational and new economics researchers, systemic designers, and advanced practitioners. With a home at OCAD University, Toronto, the Institute also partners with the VERiS Institute, located at Wilfred Laurier University.
Mandate
The Flourishing Enterprise Institute was founded in August 2019 in Waterloo, Ontario as a knowledge creation institute to serve as the applied research network to facilitate the new movement toward flourishing-as-sustainability among organizations of all types and sectors. The Institute convenes an international group of applied and design researchers, innovating to shift organizations toward achieving transformational change. The concept of a planetary network of applied research nodes is dedicated to accelerating the development and mobilization of practical knowledge and innovative solutions that will enable all organizations and their stakeholders to progress toward a flourishing future.
The Flourishing Enterprise Institute has adopted the term and idea of flourishing, in place of sustainability, as a more ambitious, scientifically-based and ethically grounded possibility for all life on our planet to thrive.
We encourage all organizations, communities, governments and societies to adopt positive support for the possibility of their flourishing. We realize that for most organizations the goals of flourishing will be meaningfully realized over time, relative to their ability to marshal their internal movement toward strong sustainment and principled economic change.
Vision
We see the flourishing goal as a movement that advances the necessity to transform the social practices of businesses to serve as organizations of social prosperity, as significant contributors to social flourishing. We envision an audacious goal of the transformation of mindsets and decision-making of the majority of business leaders and the vast majority of entrepreneurs worldwide by 2030 adopting flourishing, an extraordinary aim achieved through care and co-creation, not campaigns or coercion.
Purpose
The purpose of the Institute is to provide credible and actionable research, advisory services and design tools to accelerate the movement toward flourishing enterprises through rethinking prosperity beyond profit, responsive ecological stewardship, and pro-cultural social evolution. In this way human organizations will start to systematically remove their contributions to the root causes of the planetary crises and start to reverse its previous negative impacts on society and the environment.
