Systemic Innovation Historical Roots and Contemporary Beginnings - PDF document

Systemic Innovation — Historical Roots and Contemporary Beginnings Article synopsis ( still a rough draft ), by Dino Karabeg Acknowledgement : The research and development described here continues the visionary work of Alexander, George, Kailash, Kathrin, Nam, Ockie, Stefan, Violeta, and others, in connection with ISSS57 Vietnam. Also the work of David Price, Fredrik Refsli, Jack Park, Mei Lin Fung, Sam Hahn and our other knowledge media colleagues. This article summarizes the ideas being developed and realized by all of us together. The ‘we’ narrating the article is intended to reflect this. This draft may become a starting point for one or several articles by multiple authors. Abstract : Extending the conventional repertoire of systems research to include systemic innovation (an approach to global challenges, systems research and innovation) is an incisive (precise, practical…) answer to the recent calls within the systems community to find its role and response to “the civilization on the crossroads”. The Systems Lab is a practical way to develop systemic innovation. Introduction Extending the conventional repertoire of systems research to include systemic innovation is proposed here as an incisive (precise, practical…) answer to the recent calls within the systems community to find its role and response to “the civilization on the crossroads” [Ref: EMCSR2014, ISSS57]. This proposal has been conceived in the manner that was recommended — namely by “listening into what wants to emerge” in the systems community, and also wider, and then finding and highlighting common themes and synergies, and feeding them back into the system. We shall see that systemic innovation has been emerging in two research communities — systems sciences and knowledge media research and development — since the 1960s. Recent developments — such as CIEL, ELLabs, WELTribe and Think2Impact in the systems commnity, and Program for the Future, Global Sensemaking, DebateGraph and Knowledge

Federation in the knowledge media community — have led to a condition where all that is needed for systemic innovation to become reality is ● an organizational space where researchers, developers and other experts and stakeholders can work and develop it together ● a call to action, to energize this development and give it direction The Systems Lab — the foundations of which have been laid during the EMCSR2014 and the IFSR Conversaton 2014 — will fulfill the first role; this article will take care of the second. In the three sections that follow we will ● point briefly to the historical roots of systemic innovation in the two communities — not in the manner of historiography, but as a story introduction to this very idea, which at the same time honors some of our forefathers who developed it ● illustrate some of the recent developments, within the specific communities that are now coming together in Systems Lab — as concrete material to begin building with ● share future plans — what will or may be done in the Systems Lab, and how systemic innovation may develop in the immediate future The Conclusion will summarize in what way exactly systemic innovation — and the Systems Lab that manifests it in practice — represent on the one side a natural extension of the meta­scientific vision that motivated von Bertalanffy, Wiener and others to initiate the systems movement, and on the other side a natural and agile way to make a difference that makes a difference with regard to the “the civilization on a crossroads”. Historical Roots We introduce and motivate systemic innovation by tracing the development of creative insights of its two forefathers — system scientist Erich Jantsch, and knowledge media researcher and inventor Douglas or Doug Engelbart. Erich Jantsch

It was no coincidence that Erich Jantsch was chosen to give the opening keynote at the first (inaugural) meeting of The Club of Rome, in Spring of 1968. For the OECD in Paris, where Alex King (who—together with Aurelio Peccei—conceived the idea of The Club) was the research director, Jantsch had just completed an extensive 400 page report about the strategies by which technologies were developed and introduced in different parts of the world. And the complex contemporary issues — which The Club of Rome was intended to unravel — obviously had to do with our inability to control the power of technology for a true betterment of our and our environment’s condition. Besides, Jantsch was a brilliant scientist. Having completed his Ph.D. dissertation in astrophysics already at the age of 22, he decided that he had “more important things to do”, and hence continued his career as a systems scientist, working on the interface between society and technology. (J1) The first of Erich Jantsch’s core insights we want to mention is that the “world problematique” as The Club of Rome called the compendium of our contemporary issues was a consequence of an inadequate innovation process (we attribute to this term here a general meaning “how we use our creativity to update our social and technological reality”), or better said that it needed to be seen and treated as such. Technology has the potential to both destroy us and help us thrive. To respond to this new situation, we need to become creative or innovate in a new way. (J2) The question that naturally followed was How should the technology — and the human systems directing its power — be developed? In the Autumn of 1968 Jantsch organized a conference in Bellagio, Italy, where some of the leading systems scientists (Beer, Forrester, Ozbekhan…) gathered to co­create an answer to this question. Jantsch subsequently edited the proceedings [REF]. The participants named their answer ‘planning’, and made it clear that this was not to be confused with conventional planning — already in the first pages of the proceedings, in the “Bellagio Declaration on Planning”: Social institutions face growing difficulties as a result of an ever increasing complexity which arises directly and indirectly from the development and assimilation of technology. [...] The need for planning is not generally recognised. Further, the pursuance of

orthodox planning is quite insufficient, in that it seldom does more than touch a system through changes of the variables. Planning must be concerned with the structural design of the system itself and involved in the formation of policy. [...] The need is to plan systems as a whole, to understand the totality of factors involved and to intervene in the structural design to achieve more integrated operation. All large, complex systems are capable of some degree of self­adaptation. But in the face of immense technological, political, social and economic stresses, they will have to develop new structures. This can easily lead to grave social disturbances if the adaptation is not deliberately planned, but merely allowed to happen. In the article “From Forecasting and Planning to Policy Sciences”, which he subsequently published in the newly established journal “Policy Sciences”, Jantsch outlined an innovation process that followed from the discussions in Bellagio (see Figure 1). (see Figure 1). Figure 1: A Figure from Jantsch’s article outlining the ‘systemic innovation’ process for turning future concerns into systemic change and other impactful action. He called this new innovation process “systemic innovation”, and the corresponding way of acting “rational creative action” and even “human action model” — which is to be distinguished from the conventional “mechanistic model” where the internal organization is kept intact, and hence allowed to remain “independent of purpose”. The essential feature of “systemic innovation” is the use of a systemic “planning process”, where “forecasting” — to determine the future options and identify those desirable ones — is followed by system design and policy formation.