Society has become extremely complex and fragile, and even apparently limited and local activities can have unintended far-reaching and global consequences. The result is the world finds itself facing challenges on a global scale which are beyond the capacity of leaders from any given background to solve. It is not possible to find solutions to today's problems either in geographical isolation, or by restricting oneself to individuals sharing the same mind-set and tradition. Rather it is necessary to adopt approaches which are interdisciplinary rather than dependent on a narrow skill-set, multi scale rather than local, and cooperative rather than competitive.
The General Mission of the Out of the Box Conference is to organise an interdisciplinary meeting in which experts from a variety of backgrounds can discuss human problems of common interest. We hope that these meetings will enable people of different backgrounds to find a common language which will enable ideas for sustainable global solutions to emerge. Thus the Out of the box conference shall also (re)activate one of the most significant potential of Universities - their multidisciplinarity.
The 2012 Out of the Box Conference runs under the title Innovative Ways to Improve the Culture of Living and has following goals:
The conference is organized by the University of Maribor, the second biggest university in Slovenia and an important regional player of social, economic and technical development. University of Maribor is a broad-based institution committed to excellence in education, the extension of knowledge through basic, advanced, and applied world-quality research, and creative and artistic expression. With its complement of Arts and Sciences, Law, Business, Engineering, Medicine, and Pedagogy, the University promotes cooperation, competition, and multi-disciplinarity. We do, however, not want to own the Out of the box conference, therefore other relevant institutions are invited as coorganizers.
The conference programme will consist mainly of a series of keynote invited lectures (45 minutes each), invited lectures (30 minutes each) and a special session. The latter one will take place on Wednesday 16 May 2012, where we shall begin with the lecture by H.H. Dalai Lama, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, followed by three short talks, and then followed by an one hour panel discussion. Apart from the invited talks, there will be also a few contributed short reports and posters.