From Within: Inner Capacities for Innovation & Impact
From Within: Inner Capacities for Innovation & Impact
Strengthening the inner capacities for leadership and sustainability
📅 21 October 2026, 10:00–16:30 EEST, lunch included
🏢 In person: The Moon, RTU Innovations (Ķīpsalas 6a, 2nd floor, Riga)
👥 For: academic and administrative staff, programme and project managers, mentors, and others working with (future) leaders or organisational development
🧑🚀 Facilitated by: Paula Cukura & RTU Design Factory
⏰ Registration open until Oct 15
Welcome to an experiential workshop on the Inner Development Goals (IDGs) – a framework exploring human capacities for sustainable transformation across five dimensions: Being, Thinking, Relating, Collaborating and Acting.
Through practical exercises, reflection and collaborative work, we will explore how capacities such as self-awareness, perspective-taking, empathy, collaboration, creativity and courage show up in our everyday work – and how we can create environments where students, colleagues and teams can practise them too.
You will then choose where to put the ideas into action: teaching, mentoring, student innovation activities, project or administrative work, or the upcoming RTU Innovation Development & Future Leadership course.
Core workshop question
What inner capacities do we need to navigate complexity and change – and how can we create environments where these capacities can develop in ourselves and others?
WHY SHOULD I ATTEND?
✅ Experience the IDGs in practice – not just another framework on a slide.
✅ Explore your own inner capacities for working with complexity, uncertainty and change.
✅ Turn insights into practice in your teaching, mentoring, projects, teams or innovation activities.
✅ Meet colleagues across RTU, exchange perspectives and develop ideas together.
WHY SHOULD I CARE?
➡️ Innovation is deeply human. It depends not only on knowledge and technology, but on how we think, listen, collaborate and act.
➡️ Sustainability is complex. Knowing what needs to change does not automatically give us the capacity to make that change happen.
➡️ Universities shape more than knowledge. We also create environments where people learn to navigate uncertainty, collaborate and become agents of change.
No previous knowledge of the Doughnut or IDGs is needed.
⏰ Registration open until Oct 15!
RTU x Global Donut Days 2026 🍩
Last year, Global Donut Days at RTU explored the Doughnut* as a practical compass for the 21st century. This year, the journey continues across two connected events: Day 1 explores the systems and missions we want to transform; Day 2 turns inward to the capacities that help us make that transformation possible. Join us for both! 🍩
Join Day 1 👉 https://luma.com/6hvlduty
🍩 Come curious. Bring your everyday work challenges. Leave with new perspectives, new connections and one small experiment to put into practice.
•••
*Doughnut model is based on the UN SDGs’ social goals and environmental science. It was developed by a British economist, Kate Raworth, at Oxford. It is based on her groundbreaking book “Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist”. Inspired by this new compass for the 21st century, Doughnut Economics Action Lab – DEAL – has been growing as a global movement since 2020, offering applied research, counselling, grassroots initiatives, methodological development and breaking the silos between governments, businesses, academia and communities.
🇪🇺 The event is organised as part of the RESIST – Regional Ecosystems for Social Innovation and Social Transformation – project. The RESIST project is co-financed by the European Union (European Regional Development Fund) under the Interreg Baltic Sea Region Programme. More info: https://interreg-baltic.eu/project/resist/