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. 2016. How game changers catalyzed, disrupted, and incentivized social innovation: three historical cases of nature conservation, assimilation, and women's rights. ABSTRACT. We explore the impact of "game changers" on the dynamics of innovation over time in three problem domains, that of wilderness protection, women's rights, and assimilation of indigenous children in Canada. Taking a specifically historical and crossscale approach, we look at one social innovation in each problem domain. We explore the origins and history of the development of the National Parks in the USA, the legalization of contraception in the USA and Canada, and the residential school system in Canada.Based on a comparison of these cases, we identify three kinds of game changers, those that catalyze social innovation, which we define as "seminal," those that disrupt the continuity of social innovation, which we label exogenous shocks, and those that provide opportunities for novel combinations and recombinations, which we label as endogamous game changers.

This study counterbalances Western-derived evidence by describing Elders' and students' perspectives of Indigenous service-learning through Indigenous research methodology. Data collection took place in a midsize Canadian university after an Indigenous service-learning public networking forum. The purposive sample consisted of three Indigenous elders and five Indigenous students. Immediately following the event, Elders participated in a focus group, and then students completed a survey. Qualitative themes were interpreted using conversational method and relational analysis. Elders called for the replacement of the term service-learning, re-rooting of the term Indigenous, and respect for the Elders' roles and knowledges. Interconnected themes by Elders and students signalled a necessary shift from service-learning to relational learning. Such connections reveal the core purpose of relational learning with Indigenous communities as maintaining good relations through humility, respect, honesty, and reciprocity while responding to the interconnected priorities of the land, traditional ways, Elders, and common language. Findings signal decolonizing opportunities for relational learning with Indigenous communities.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, seven researchers reflect on the journeys their research projects have taken when they engage with and synthesize complex problems. These journeys embody an adaptive approach to tackling problems characterized by their interconnectedness and emergence, and that transcend traditional units of analysis such as ecosystems. In this paper we argue that making such a process deliberate and explicit will help researchers better combine different research paradigms such as expert-driven and participant-directed work, thus resulting in both broad explanations and specific phenomenon; research tensions traditionally defined as oppositional must be approached as complimentary. This paper includes researchers' personal journeys as they dealt with the emergent properties of complex problems and participant involvement. This paper argues that that research journey should be more than accidental but is a methodological necessity and should guide the theoretical and practical approaches to complex problems.