Taking advantage of emergence for complex innovation eco-systems

Abstract

Our most pressing societal problems such as enhancing health care, developing alternate energy, revitalizing cities, and advancing the economy are complex innovation eco-systems. Complex innovation eco-systems are the next frontier in technology and innovation management, and require a transformation in strategic and institutional management so that managers can muster the staying power to persist and learn far into the future. I develop a framework to explain how participants can strategize across an entire eco-system, deal with the profound ambiguity from complexity, and handle the very long cycle times of complex innovations. Transformed strategic and institutional management combines abductive learning routines with clock-time and event-time pacing to map a portfolio of value creating opportunities far into the future. Eco-system participants use learning events, which represent available knowledge, to hypothesize new value creating opportunities and new kinds of governance structures for specific collaborations, evaluate these opportunities and governance structures by trying them out to explore assumptions and surface new possibilities, and reframe them over time.Many of society's most pressing problems are complex innovation eco-systems. Pharmaceuticals, health care more generally, alternate energy systems, climate control, education, and myriad social problems rely on ongoing innovation to continually generate new projects, products, programs, processes, capabilities, and value creation opportunities that address these critical challenges. These "grand challenges" (Ferraro et al. 2015) represent the next frontier in technology and innovation management, because they require new theory for managing multiple organizations, agents, and agencies, and new theory for collaborative learning about the co-evolution of sciences and technologies among vast, globally dispersed networks of knowledge workers.Taking advantage of emergence (Dougherty 2016) is a central capability around which new theories for complex innovation eco-systems will build. Innovators in complex eco-systems must take advantage of the emergence of knowledge about sciences, technologies, user needs, delivery systems and so on for their new products and programs, because knowledge for innovation does not already exist. Taking advantage of emergence refers to grabbing the inherently fragmented and noisy information that abounds in complex eco-systems, configuring information bits into potential solutions

The Key Driving Forces for Geo-Economic Relationships between China and ASEAN Countries

“…Fourth, global open innovation as a new emerging driving force will play a further important role in future geo-economic development. It covers regional open innovation [38], complex innovation eco-systems [39], open sustainable innovation [40], global innovation network and territorial innovation system [41,42], globalization of collaborative R & D [43], etc. Open innovation can enhance networking innovative stakeholders and regional R&D activity [44], conquer the growth limits of capitalism [45], facilitate interconnections between countries and make progress in regional innovation policy and entrepreneurial eco-systems [46].…”

Framing Open Innovation in Start-Ups’ Incubators: A Complexity Theory Perspective

“…Nowadays, companies need to select the mechanisms and behaviors to be most beneficial in engendering a continuous innovation process while dealing with the increasing complexity on a day-by-day basis [4,11]. Businesses are required to innovate and evolve in an ecosystem that is increasingly complex [5,12], with new, comprehensive approaches.…”

“…This is true also for the context of Open Innovation. Indeed, a diffuse topic of investigation through complexity lens is the mechanisms and approaches adopted in opening up the innovation process to establish one or more relationships with external actors, such as in open innovation networks [4] and ecosystems [5]. Among the possible mechanisms, the incubation and venturing process has a key role in offering supportive environments for sustaining the growth of new ventures and then bring innovations to the market [6,7].…”

Organizing for innovation in complex innovation systems

“…But the nature of their interdependence has transformed because many social and economic challenges today are complex innovation systems (Dougherty, 2016). Leveraging the potential of twenty-first century sciences and technologies to resolve the grand challenges (Ferraro, Etzion, & Gehman, 2015) societies face in health care, alternate energy, water scarcity, climate management, poverty, and economic revitalization requires major innovations in organizational social technologies (Pisano, 2010).…”

“…The framework encompasses the entire ecology of organizations, agencies, and agents, public and private, who grapple with a particular grand challenge even though they have diverse objectives. Building on work by Van de Ven (1986); Van de Ven, Polley, Garud, and Venkataraman (1999); Garud, Gehman, and Kumaraswamy (2011), and my own research (Dougherty, 2006(Dougherty, , 2016, I suggest disentangling the ecology of complex innovation into distinct problems of discovery: generating new products and programs; developing and integrating knowledge across the ecology; strategically framing innovation for long term development across the ecology; and enabling new governance mechanisms in the ecology. Each discovery problem is an essential part of complex innovation that involves many players.…”