Complex societal challenges cannot be resolved with quick fixes, nor can they be successfully addressed from disciplinary or institutional silos. In this article we propose an innovative approach to tackling contemporary societal challenges based on complexity theory and transdisciplinarity. The lens of complexity reveals that such challenges emerge within complex contexts. Complex challenges cannot simply be resolved, due to their dynamic, non-linear nature. Instead, the complex context itself can be steered in a certain desired direction through iterative action and learning cycles. Transdisciplinary approaches help us understand how different perspectives and ways of knowing held by relevant actors can be combined to serve effective action in complex contexts. We have integrated complexity theory and transdisciplinarity to create a co-evolutionary model of innovation illustrating that who we work with, how we work, and what we learn and create co-evolve over time. We show how an innovation approach based on building a vision and including a reflexive social learning method can provide a guiding structure to this co-evolutionary process. We illustrate this approach with a case study focused on improving the well-being of staff and students at a university. We conclude the paper with implications for design.

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The benefits of student–staff partnerships are widely reported in the Students-as-Partners literature. It is envisaged that partnership initiatives can have a transformative effect on institutional cultures, however, how this transformation might be achieved is less clear. Building on transdisciplinary and systems change perspectives, we propose a Partnership Outcome Spaces framework to develop an understanding of how student–staff partnerships might influence institutional cultures. We identify four outcome spaces: situation, knowledge, learning and relationships, with reflexivity and a structured partnership methodology as key enablers of these outcomes. This framework is applied to a case study examining a Student Services Hub project in one Australian university. Through this analysis, the importance of less tangible and relational outcomes arising from student–staff partnerships are highlighted. To influence institutional culture change, we encourage student–staff partnership practitioners to purposefully negotiate the various possible outcomes of their initiatives as an integral part of the partnership process.

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In order for universities to flourish, we need to ensure that their staff and students are well mentally, physically and socially. Improving wellbeing is an open, systemic and complex challenge, because it contains many interrelated and dynamic problems and concerns. Such challenges cannot be ‘solved’ by using traditional and reductionist problem-solving strategies. In this paper we demonstrate how we worked towards an integrated systemic design and transdisciplinary innovation approach to improve the wellbeing of staff and students at the University of Technology Sydney. We developed a systemic vision of university wellbeing which considers wellbeing a characteristic of the community as a whole, and an integral part of education and research, rather than an issue that needs to be addressed by a separate ‘service’. The transdisciplinary and systemic design approach is further characterised by an ongoing evolutionary action-approach; an integration of diverse ways of knowing including various academic disciplines, Indigenous ways of knowing and community knowledge; and a structured learning strategy to support system change based on mutual learning and reflexivity. We discuss how this case illustrates how transdisciplinary learning approaches can strengthen systemic design practices@en