Profile
Dr Toivonen is a research leader in the area of regenerative innovation, design, entrepreneurship and creativity, with an enduring interest in ways of being and creating that can align human societies with the more-than-human world.
Tuukka Toivonen, PhD (Oxon.) is the director of the Becoming Regenerative Lab (LUL, RCA, UCL) that hosts the transdisciplinary UKRI-funded Becoming Regenerative Project (B-Regen), building on his roots in sociology, organisational science and creativity studies. He is a Reader in Regenerative Design and Innovation at Loughborough University London’s Institute for Creative Futures and a long-time faculty member at STEaPP, University College London. He is also affiliated with the Living Systems Lab at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. Together with the B-Regen team, Tuukka combines design research and process-driven social science methods to investigate how regenerative innovations emerge in the real-world, with a focus on the creative industries (fashion, architecture, biodesign, arts and technology). This research is in a continuous conversation with concurrent impact activities that aim to strengthen emerging regenerative innovation ecosystems and startups in the UK and globally.
Tuukka’s research has attracted over £1.4M in competitive research funding and it has led to world-class publications in outlets such as the Academy of Management Journal and the Stanford Social Innovation Review as well as to several well-received contributions to academic societies such as the Systemic Design Association (RSD) and the Design Research Society (DRS). Tuukka is currently also a regular contributor to the legendary music producer Rick Rubin’s Tetragrammaton cultural platform, authoring unconventional essays that explore how we can become alive to the more-than-human world given contemporary social and ecological conditions. This public-facing work draws on embodied practices, phenomenological insights, East Asian thought and perspectives from ecological philosophy, along with creativity and design studies.
At a fundamental level, Tuukka’s work is motivated by the desire to explore ways of being, relating and creating that can help us reconnect with – and regenerate – the living world. This constitutes a vital task at a time of acute ecological crisis that is connected to the unhealthy, alienating distance that humans continue to put between themselves and the more-than-human world (both conceptually and materially). He is particularly curious about the role and transformative potential of direct interactions in seeking to overcome such divisions – including interactions that unfold between human co-creators as well as those that transpire between humans and nonhuman living organisms. It is these kinds of interactions that propel innovative ideas, material discoveries and entrepreneurial projects forward, as demonstrated in Tuukka’s recent collaborative work on so-called Creative Jolts (published in the Academy of Management Journal and elsewhere) as well as in his emerging work on interspecies and multispecies creativity.
The following themes are at the centre of Tuukka’s current collaborative research (as of October 2024):
- Interspecies creativity and the discovery of regenerative potentials (process-based perspectives), with the B-Regen team and Melenie Hecker
- Bringing organisations into the more-than-human world and the role of direct perception as a vital pathway to (regenerative) relating and knowing, with Heini Salonen
- How entrepreneurs enact synergies between living systems and economic (innovation) systems despite inherent tensions, in areas such as fashion, architecture, technology and material science, with the B-Regen team
- Barriers to regenerative innovation and its management in organisations and relevant industries, with Melenie Hecker
- Regenerative imagination and how art and design schools manage to cultivate it – based on a more-than-human ethos – regardless of considerable organisational dysfunction, deficient management and resource scarcity/scarcity mindsets, with Delfina Fantini van Ditmar
Plural intelligences and co-developing ‘AI for a more-than-human world’ through entrepreneurship, design, art and science (under development), with Delfina Fantini van Ditmar and collaborators
In terms of wider academic background, Tuukka possesses 15+ years of experience at top global institutions such as the University of Oxford, University College London, Kyoto University and Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. He has been the leader and co-developer of three distinguished master's programmes: MA Social Entrepreneurship (Goldsmiths), MSc Global Prosperity (University College London) and MA Innovation Management (Central Saint Martins). This work has required Tuukka to participate in every conceivable kind of committee and administrative role. Tuukka has moreover created and taught on a number of modules covering social entrepreneurship and innovation, global social problems and social constructionism, sustainability challenges, innovation processes and organisation theory as well as ethnographic methods. Tuukka currently delivers lectures and talks at multiple universities and events in the UK and globally drawing on his collaborative research into regenerative innovation, design and entrepreneurship.
To translate his academic research and experience into social impact, Tuukka works directly with emerging regenerative designers and startups in the creative, material innovation and technology sectors. He is also generating public-facing content on regenerative topics in multiple countries while co-producing industry-facing reports for external clients such as the British Council, Sitra and others. He is a Senior Associate at the organisational ethics consultancy Principia Advisory which helps some of the world’s largest corporations to develop ethical cultures.
Research
2021-present
Tuukka currently serves as the Principal Investigator of the Becoming Regenerative Project (ESRC & AHRC, £1M, 2024-2027), with Professor Delfina Fantini van Ditmar (RCA), Dr Onya Idoko (UCL) and Dr Ida Telalbasic (LUL) as Co-Investigators. A key goal of this transdisciplinary project is to apply a combination of design research and empirical social science methods to map out the complex creative journeys of emerging regenerative designers and entrepreneurs, focusing on critical moments and stages. The project also seeks to shed light on how such creatives find synergies between living systems and economic systems amid inherent tensions. The parameters and ambitions of this project grew out of earlier papers, groups and exchanges Tuukka developed while at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London (2020-2024) where he explored various practices of “creating with and for nature” through interviews with bioartists and designers. As this research grew, Tuukka decided to bring it to a supportive research-oriented institutional context while explicitly shaping it into a collaboration between scholars and communities based at three distinctive universities.
2005-2020
In this period, Tuukka drew on his sociological and policy-focused PhD experience at the University of Oxford to investigate youth unemployment and social entrepreneurship in Japan; the social construction of youth problems; emerging social innovation communities; the creative journeys and transformations of early-staged entrepreneurs in London (NetCreate Project/ESRC/£250,000); challenge prizes in Finland; and the dynamics of innovation labs as well as coworking, among other topics. This research led to a monograph, two co-edited books and numerous peer-reviewed articles, culminating in an Academy of Management Journal piece on Creative Jolts (with Onya Idoko, Sarah Harvey and Harsh Jha), a transformative – in some ways destructive – episode experienced by entrepreneurs and creatives when subjected to feedback that irrefutably undermines their core idea, demanding fundamental revisions.
Supervision
PhD supervision interests
Tuukka is open to inquiries from advice-seekers as well as prospective PhD students with resonant research interests, including the creative process and the role of interactions therein (both human and multispecies); regenerative design, entrepreneurship and innovation; and more-than-human organisations, or organisations that seek a radically direct and mutually beneficial relationship with the living world, including through the application of AI. Currently, Tuukka supervises a team of postdocs, co-investigators, administrators and freelancers linked to the Becoming Regenerative Project, while also advising masters and PhD students internationally on an ad hoc basis.
Research expertise
- Regenerative creativity and innovation
- The creative process and idea journeys (longitudinal tracing methodologies)
- Regenerative entrepreneurship in the creative industries
- Interspecies and multispecies creativity; more-than-human perspectives
- Perception, ecology and organisations
- Regenerative imagination