ALT-FRONTIER · Emotionally Intelligent Innovation for Sustainable Futures

Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.

Project objective

ALT-FRONTIER harnesses artificial intelligence and cultural wisdom to pioneer emotionally intelligent innovation, reclaiming innovation as a civilisational choice for the good life and charting a renewed EU–Africa trajectory. Current innovation and development models, shaped by technocentric logics of optimisation and control, have delivered advances but also fragility—accelerating ecological breakdown, social disconnection, and erosion of human capacity. My experience of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake revealed resilience lies not in control but in resonance with nature, exposing the limits of dominant models and inspiring a re-imagination of the vector of innovation. Yet most sustainability “solutions” remain framed within the same paradigms they seek to repair.This fellowship proposes an alternative frontier by rooting innovation in emotional intelligence (EI) and relational ontologies, making sustainability and wellbeing inherent outcomes rather than engineered targets. Through co-creation across island and archipelagic contexts — Malta, Ghana, Hawai‘i, and Japan — it develops an EI knowledge base grounded in diverse cultural ways of knowing and being, beyond Western universals, an emotionally intelligent voice interface, and a mixed-reality artifact embedding EI in daily life. Outcomes converge in a prototype demonstration of an emotionally intelligent smart community, showing technology and cultural wisdom co-function to chart an alternative smart-development trajectory. These proofs-of-concept will be co-created and tested in Malta and Ghana, ensuring cultural grounding and policy impact. The project advances scholarship by reframing innovation as ontological and civilisational, and contributes to policy by aligning with Horizon Europe priorities, the AU–EU partnership, and the New European Bauhaus. ALT-FRONTIER offers one of the first demonstrable models of emotionally intelligent innovation, opening pathways toward plural and regenerative futures.

Original text from CORDIS.

Participants

• UNIVERSITA TA MALTA · MSIDACoordinatorMalta
• UNIVERSITY OF GHANA · ACCRAGhana
• UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII · HonoluluUnited States

Links

• View on CORDIS
• DOI: 10.3030/101285125