Challenge-led Innovation Workbook
Organising for Systems Innovation at Scale
Our team at Griffith Centre for Systems Innovation have been experimenting with and evolving a Challenge-led Innovation Approach (based on Mission-oriented approaches developed by Mariana Mazzucato at UCL IIPP and others internationally).
We are using this approach to guide the way we work internally and engage with our systems innovation partners.
We’ve facilitated intensive Re:Treats, worked with government bodies, businesses and civic organisations, and engaged deeply with others exploring this work. We have a bias for developing and testing HOW such approaches could be applied to respond to both local and global challenges rather than getting too caught up in the what and why of such approaches.
We decided to openly share our learnings and thinking to date in this workbook, to spark conversations and innovation in both practice and thinking amongst those exploring how we work, and to learn together to address complex systems and challenges.
We see this booklet as a first step in a longer learning journey. In it we share an overview of:
- the principles and processes that sparked our evolution to a Challenge-led Innovation framework (from Mission-oriented).
- examples of our learnings from other system innovators who are experimenting.
- an adaptable process to help guide the learning journey.
- learning tools and canvases to catalyse thinking, practice, and further adaptations.
Part One sets out some foundations we’ve identified as important to Challenge-led Innovation.
If you want to jump straight into the mapping process, we suggest you skip to Part Two.
The final section, Part Three, focuses on what we have learnt about the conditions needed and how to get started on a Challenge-led initiative.
We are sharing this framework and our explorations not as a fully fledged model, but rather, as a ‘work in progress’, a promising but still emergent way of organising for scaled up systemic innovation.
We will keep learning, testing and evolving these ideas — and we welcome opportunities to work alongside others who are learning their way into organising for large-scale transitions.
Such learning has to happen through action and collaboration, it is by it’s very nature emergent, but with a purpose and a direction. We are not living at a time where this learning can be abstracted, hoarded nor simplified into commercialisable models — the stakes are too high for that.
So, please, if you are working in or on applied ways in which we can organise for systemic transitions, and if it makes sense to share and compare — reach out! (gcsi@griffith.edu.au)
In the meantime, we continue this work, and expect our opinions, frameworks and learnings to morph, shift, evolve and grow over coming months and years.