Started last August for the first time, IDEAS is a one-year program designed to help Indonesia confront its challenges more effectively. It does so by engaging leaders across sectors to jointly step forward and take on Indonesia's complex challenges of conservation, education and business/social enterprise by going through a profound learning process. Together, they identify the root causes and collectively develop a closer relationship to work together and evolve a commitment to implement the solutions that are created.

Unlike other programs, which are too theory-focused, IDEAS is a practice-based journey. After an orientation and a few sessions on System Thinking and the Theory a set of principles of problem-solving and innovation developed by MIT's world renown professors Peter Senge and Otto Scharmer's IDEAS fellows spend the rest of their curriculum on building prototypes (projects), retreats, field trips, practice-sharing (shadowing), and other group-based activities.