About
Strategy, Collaboration, and Human-Centered AI
Strategic Growth & Innovation (SG+I) works at the intersection of technology, leadership, workforce transformation, and human impact.
We help organizations and cross-sector partners navigate consequential questions surrounding AI and technological change—bringing together strategy, governance, applied learning, and the people and institutions affected by that change.
SG+I is the steward of Human Edge, our human-centered AI collaboration model connecting universities, industry, and public sector partners through interdisciplinary, real-world experiences.
Our Work
Technology change rarely happens in isolation. It intersects with people, institutions, workforce needs, governance, risk, trust, and the realities of implementation.
SG+I works across those boundaries through two primary areas of work.
Human Edge
Human Edge is SG+I's human-centered AI collaboration model.
Through Studios and Roundtables, universities, industry, government, technology, workforce, research, and civic institutions come together around real-world challenges and consequential questions involving AI and society.
Studios build capability through applied, interdisciplinary experience. Roundtables build shared understanding through cross-sector dialogue.
Strategic Engagements
SG+I also works selectively with organizations navigating AI, workforce transformation, governance, organizational change, and cross-sector engagement.
Engagements are shaped around the question and context rather than a predefined consulting package.
Our role may include framing complex questions, designing stakeholder engagement, developing operating approaches, facilitating cross-sector dialogue, synthesizing what emerges, and translating strategy into practical next steps.
This work can also include curated Roundtable engagements designed around a particular organization, region, stakeholder community, or area of inquiry.
How We Work
Human-Centered
Technology matters, but people, judgment, trust, and organizational context shape how it is understood, adopted, and applied.
Applied
We focus on real questions, real operating environments, and practical ways to move from ideas into action.
Cross-Sector
Many consequential challenges cross traditional organizational and disciplinary boundaries. We create structures that allow different forms of expertise to inform one another.
Trust-Centered
Durable collaboration depends on clarity, thoughtful engagement, and respect for the different responsibilities and perspectives people bring to the work.
Stewarding Human Edge
SG+I provides the strategic direction, program and experience design, partnership development, cross-sector curation, facilitation, synthesis, and operating infrastructure behind Human Edge.
As the model develops, SG+I maintains its human-centered purpose and integrity while creating meaningful ways for universities, employers, technology organizations, government, workforce and research institutions, civic leaders, and public-learning organizations to contribute.
Human Edge remains platform-independent. Partners can contribute expertise, technology, data, environments, resources, and perspective without defining or controlling the model.
Our Team
Shauna M. Conway
Founder & Principal
Shauna Conway is the Founder and Principal of Strategic Growth & Innovation and the founder of Human Edge.
She brings more than 20 years of experience across technology leadership, strategy, governance, cybersecurity, risk, financial services, software, consulting, and public-sector collaboration.
A former CIO and CISO, Shauna has spent her career working across technical and non-technical environments, helping leaders translate complex technology questions into decisions that account for business priorities, risk, people, and organizational realities.
Today, her work focuses increasingly on the questions emerging as AI moves into organizations and society: how people develop the judgment to use it responsibly, how institutions prepare for change, and how leaders across sectors can work together on challenges that no single organization can address alone.
Through SG+I and Human Edge, she designs and facilitates interdisciplinary experiences and cross-sector collaborations connecting education, industry, technology, workforce, government, and civic institutions.
Brian Jin
Data & AI Engineer, Human Edge
Brian supports the technical development and delivery of Human Edge, with a focus on the data and AI environments that enable applied Studio experiences.
A data science graduate currently pursuing his master's degree, Brian has helped design and build the data environment used across Human Edge Studios, bringing together datasets, analytical tools, and AI capabilities that allow interdisciplinary teams to explore real-world questions.
He works across the technical and participant experience, helping translate complex data and technology into environments that are accessible to participants with different backgrounds and levels of technical expertise.
Where Technology Meets Human Judgment
AI is creating new capabilities at extraordinary speed. How people use them, govern them, adapt to them, and make decisions with them requires more than technology alone.
Through Human Edge and select strategic engagements, SG+I creates structure around complex questions, connects the people and perspectives needed to examine them, and helps translate dialogue and insight into practical next steps.