Dr Ingrid Burkett is a systems innovation practitioner, researcher and creative whose work is dedicated to shaping more regenerative and distributive futures for people, places and the planet. She is Co-Director of The Good Shift, a women-led, for-purpose enterprise that scaffolds systems innovation efforts with communities, governments, industry and systems change collectives. Through The Good Shift, Ingrid focuses on building capabilities, conditions and infrastructures that enable transitions toward greener and more just futures in diverse contexts, from local initiatives to national and international collaborations.

Until November 2024, Ingrid was Professor and Director of the Griffith Centre for Systems Innovation (formerly The Yunus Centre) at Griffith University’s Business School. In this role she led a multidisciplinary innovation hub with a purpose of accelerating shifts to regenerative and distributive economic and social systems. She remains an Adjunct Professor with Griffith Business School, continuing to contribute to research and practice around systems innovation and impact-led entrepreneurship.

Ingrid’s practice sits at the intersection of innovation, entrepreneurship and impact. Her academic background spans design, social work, economics and business, and she has spent more than three decades working on complex social and economic challenges. This has included place-based inequities, redesigning how we invest and contract for deeper impact, and exploring how commissioning and funding systems can better support long-term, systemic change. She has built five social businesses and has played key roles in designing practice models, policy and processes in areas such as local economic development, ageing, disability, procurement, impact finance and impact investment.

A number of Ingrid’s career highlights relate to helping establish the foundations for social procurement in Australia, including authoring guidebooks and research reports that supported governments and organisations to embed social outcomes in purchasing and contracting. She also contributed to the groundwork for Australia’s entry into social and impact investment during her time as Innovation Manager in the country’s first community development finance institution. In parallel, she has led the design of several significant place-based initiatives aimed at addressing entrenched disadvantage, such as GROW (Geelong Region Opportunities for Work), an innovative and award-winning approach to engaging business in tackling regional disadvantage through employment and procurement.

Ingrid has held senior leadership roles within the Australian social innovation ecosystem, including at The Australian Centre for Social Innovation (TACSI), where she built internal and external capability in design for social innovation and led TACSI’s portfolio of systems innovation work focused on some of Australia’s most challenging social issues. Internationally, she is a Past President and Honorary Ambassador of the International Association for Community Development and has been deeply involved in fostering dialogue about participatory, regenerative futures. Her university roles have included serving as the inaugural Social Design Fellow at the Centre for Social Impact at the University of New South Wales and the University of Western Australia.

Alongside her systems and innovation work, Ingrid is an artist and graphic designer, as well as a puppeteer and street performer. She uses creative practice to shift conversations about justice, sustainability and the futures we can collectively imagine, bringing visual thinking, storytelling and play into the practice of systems change and community engagement.