Organizing Ecologies of Complex Innovation

Abstract

F or many sectors like health care, financial services, or renewable energy, new products and services are generated by an ecology of business firms, nonprofit foundations, public institutions, and other agents. Knowledge to innovate is dispersed across ecologies, so no single firm or small group of firms can innovate alone. Moreover, many new products and services in ecologies such as health care or energy are complex or comprise many parts with unknown interactions. New products, knowledge, business models, and applications all emerge unpredictably over considerable time periods, as various agents in the ecologies of innovation interact with and react to the actions of others. However, the existing organizing structure in these ecologies stifles emergence and precludes much innovation, simply because theory and practice do not adequately address how to organize for complex innovation. We develop a preliminary model for organizing ecologies of complex innovation. We suggest that innovations can continually emerge productively if people work locally in ecologies to set and solve problems of orchestrating knowledge capabilities across the ecology, strategizing across the ecology to create new businesses and applications, and developing public policies to embrace ambiguity. Using examples from biopharmaceuticals and alternative energy, we develop specific organizing ideas that can be examined and elaborated upon. This new direction for organization science integrates existing ideas around a new kind of organizing and shows how organization science can add real value in addressing major challenges of public welfare and safety in the 21st century.

What is a Complex Innovation System?

“…It is a non-linear process with feedback between the different stages of development. Innovation is an emergent property of a complex adaptive social system [54][55][56][57][58][59][60].…”

Infusing Sustainability: The Role of External Triggers and Internal Actors in Pursuing Change

“…Finally, they can build up networks of important potential partners. Research has shown that due to the increased complexity of sustainable development, organizations often need their stakeholders in their innovation efforts and cannot create these innovations in isolation (e.g., Dougherty & Dunne, 2011).…”

Health Care Information Systems: Architectural Models and Governance

“…Working on Dougherty and Dunne (2011), and considering the empirical evidences collected by the IHCO (2011), is it possible to state that all the models that allow the achievement of good external governance of HCISs are characterized by three dynamics:…”

“…The process through which these connection are constructed is initiated by a variety of fluctuations that occur outside the norm, so the various agents need to interact and react to feedback about the action of others (Lichtenstein & Plowman, 2009 The second dynamic is composed of deviation-amplifying activities, such as positive feedback, that move the overall health care system toward a new kind of order (Dougherty & Dunne, 2011) that-being characterized by higher levels of integration among the different health information systems-is comprehensively better in terms of social impact (IHCO, 2011). Floricel and Dougherty (2007) suggest that reciprocal value can be created and can persist if each actor enables the heterogeneity of the possible outputs to be explored and experimented through time.…”