Seyithan Ahmet Ates

Dr. Ates is Associate Professor at the Social Sciences University of Ankara. He has a particular interest in social innovation, social entrepreneurship, sustainable development, socio-technical transformation, design thinking, blockchain for social impact and gamification.

Dr. Ates has obtained graduate and undergraduate degrees from Vienna University of Economics and PhD degree (Doktor der Sozial- und Wirtschaftswissenschaften) from Vienna University of Technology in 2011. He was a visiting scholar at Harvard University in 2016-2017.

Along with teaching and research activities, he has been involved in projects at UNIDO (United Nations Industrial Development Organization) and EBRD (European Bank for Reconstruction and Development) as investigator and country expert. With the belief that social innovation is key to overcome the so called “middle welfare trap” by sustaining and improving the wellbeing of the people beyond increasing the monetary term welfare, Dr. Ates has founded Bostan Institute for Social Innovation in 2015 ( www.sosyal-inovasyon.com ). As an action researcher, Dr. Ates is leading currently following initiatives;

• Brainstorming platform covering illustrative cases of social innovation: http://www.ileridonusum.net/ (in Turkish)  and http://www.thinqbox.org/ (in English)
• Open, collaborative and free library of Turkey: www.yeryuzukutuphanesi.com
• Design For Change Turkey for creating change by fostering “I can” mindset: www.gucbende.org 
• An innovative mobile app combining creativity and technology with higher level of questioning and to-do challenges: www.gacemer.com

For more details and weekly blog posts of Dr. Ates, you can visit https://medium.com/@seyithan.ahmet