Shaping Innovation Futures
A case for greater investment into systems innovation infrastructure in Australasia
There is a direction to history and it is toward cooperation at larger scales.
Haidt, 2022
We need to reimagine how we organise and act.
We have entered a time of increasing disruption, change, and risk. The challenges and opportunities we face today are complex, hyper-connected, and consequential. How we navigate them will determine the quality of life for future generations.
Shaping Innovation Futures starts from a pragmatic but hopeful standpoint — our individual and collective capabilities to comprehend our surroundings and forge new realities have been defining traits of humankind. Imagination, cooperation, and innovation are our superpowers.
However, to realise safe and stable futures, we need to evolve how we harness these capabilities. We need to innovate innovation.
What might this look like?
Systemic challenges require systemic responses. We need to move beyond specific solutions and develop systems of innovation (and solutions) to address the complex and interconnected challenges we currently face and will continue to face in the future.
While ‘innovation’ is often narrowly framed and pursued, we now need new and improved approaches, processes, and systems to shape the future of humanity and the planet. Many of these approaches are not limited to new technologies or market-based entrepreneurship. This is not to downplay the role of technology and markets but to emphasise other dimensions that influence how these powerful tools are developed and deployed.
To bring forth a new generation of innovation, we must also reimagine and rebuild the underlying conditions and infrastructures that enable people to experiment and act in ways that are genuinely transformative.
Enter Shaping Innovation Futures
To understand how we can further promote systems innovation and the support it requires, we first need to gain a better understanding of pioneering initiatives that are experimenting with systemic approaches to innovation.
So, in late 2022 we gathered a group of systems thinkers and doers to undertake a joint exploration of:
- why and how such initiatives are developed;
- how they operate;
- how they evolve;
- the capacities they require; and
- the factors that enable or constrain their development.
** We recognize that this work took place at a specific point in time and that learning and iteration processes with initiatives like these are continuous.**
What did we learn?
The transformation gap
While there is growing recognition among capital holders and decision-makers of the need for systems change and transformation, the practical implications and mobilisation of such approaches remain unclear.
On the other hand, we are witnessing an increasing number of promising initiatives that are experimenting with systems organising and innovation (we refer to these as ‘systems initiatives’). However, almost all of them struggle to access adequate support and resources.
Below we pull out common attributes, practices and needs we observed across the initiatives, hopefully of use to practitioners working in systems innovation, and to funders / capital holders and policy-makers looking to understand the various ways they can support and grow work to transform systems.
The full report dives into these in more detail.
Diverse contexts but common attributes
Systems initiatives are diverse and influenced by their context, but they also share common attributes. These attributes include:
- Holding a bold ambition to move toward a future state that provides fundamentally better outcomes for people, places, and the planet.
- Providing spaces and platforms that enable actors and stakeholders to come together around shared goals, leverage their collective intelligence, and take actions that have the potential for ‘better outcomes,’ often in novel ways.
- Contributing to rethinking the fundamentals of how current systems and structures work and supporting cultures that are open to new paradigms and possibilities.
- Intentionally using a range of levers to incentivize, enable, and sustain multiple innovations across and within the chosen systems context.
- Establishing and maintaining mechanisms that enable coherence, such as networked governance and information flows, and connecting actors and actions in ways that make the whole more productive than the sum of its parts.
We also observed that systems initiatives: take a long-term perspective while holding multiple time horizons, embrace messiness and adapt to emergence, foster change through multiple dimensions and ‘scaling pathways’, and embody and nest transformation processes.
Common practices and needs
In addition to these common attributes, we observed common practices, processes, and inputs that enable systems initiatives to take shape and function. These include:
- Systems readiness and self-organisation — developing social capital, understanding and visualising the system, taking time to organise and deliberate, and finding a shared language that encourages and aligns participation.
- Processes of instigation — ‘who initiates’ and the art of convening.
- Developing core infrastructures — organising platforms (broadly defined), implementing networked governance, leveraging the role of data, creating learning and knowledge systems, and providing enablers of innovation and action.
- Linking and nesting — connecting with macro systems and structures while embodying change at the micro level.
- Accessing appropriate resources — securing funding suitable for core infrastructures and systemic financing for innovation and action.
A call for action
We call for greater attention, support, and resources for systems innovation. And urge capital holders, decision-makers, innovators, and influencers to recognise the importance of advancing this work.
Ultimately, expanding the scale and effectiveness of systems innovation relies on building new innovation capabilities and infrastructures.
We deliberately use the term ‘infrastructures.’ Just as we acknowledge the significance of providing infrastructures for essential services like energy, mobility, water, and waste, the same lens (and investment) should be applied to mobilising human agency, creativity, and cooperation.
We also need more rigorous, critical explorations of systems innovation to understand and inform these developments.
As a result, we propose three foundational directions to promote systems innovation in Australasia. These directions are framed around questions focused on engagement and intentional dialogue, connecting and strengthening practice, and further discovery.
Read the full report for more detail and to see which questions for exploration you might dive into.
With big thanks and appreciation for our partners and discovery cohort.
