Systemic Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Draft by Dino Karabeg, January 14, 2012

Enabling systemic innovation

At the workshop that Knowledge Federation organized within the Triple Helix

IX conference at Stanford University last July, it was explained that the core

purpose of Knowledge Federation is to ‘enable systemic innovation.’ This

requires an explanation.

A new wave of innovation is often enabled by a new technology (think about

the transistor, the VLSI chip or the computer). The Web too in principle

enabled innovation to expand into a new domain, where new socio-technical

systems for knowledge work (journalism, education, research, governance...)

are created. Yet this new wave of innovation has not yet reached us. The Web

– as well as other information technologies – are largely being used to power

the patterns of use and interaction that have been developed based on old

technology, such as the writing desk and the filing cabinet (in the user

interface of the personal computer) and the printing press and the classroom

[1].

We are now in a paradoxical situation: While our children are solving the

challenges of World of Warcraft by collaborating globally and in real time

using state-of-the-art virtual world technology, we serious researchers still try

to tackle increasingly urgent and complex real-world challenges by publishing

old-fashioned articles and going to conferences. This state of affairs obviously

cannot last. But what is the alternative? And who will create it? While Blizzard

Entertainment had no difficulty creating World of Warcraft within a traditional

company setting, no game manufacturer can re-create the ‘game’ of

journalism or of academic publishing and education. The journalists, and the

academic researchers and educators, i.e. the people practicing in those

professions, need to evolve new ways of working themselves. But they cannot

do this on their own, because they lack the relevant technical and other

expertise. And because ‘their job’ is to practice within their professions as they

have learned them, not to recreate their professions.

Knowledge Federation self-organizes as an answer to the above challenge. In

Knowledge Federation field experts, such as journalists, researchers and

educators, collaborate with knowledge media researchers and developers, and

with other stakeholders as needed. New systemic solutions are created and

tested by using ‘bootstrapping’ or self-organization – the community uses

itself as a sandbox to develop and test solutions.

As a result of several years of such self-organization, at our Stanford

workshop we were able to introduce Knowledge Federation as a ‘missing

piece’ that is still needed to trigger this new wave of innovation. Knowledge

Federation has deliberately been conceived as a collaborative ‘The Game-

Changing Game,’ where ‘winning positions’ are new systemic solutions for key

areas of knowledge work put to use. In other words, an explicit goal of

Knowledge Federation is to change the practice.

To get an idea of the ‘winning stakes‘ in this game, for each of the ‘players‘ and

for the society, think of a new systemic solution for knowledge work as a new

piece of machinery, whose ‘nuts and bolts’ are the information technologies

and the people engaged in knowledge work, as researchers and students,

journalists and readers. The usefulness of each nut and each bolt in a piece of

machinery is of course limited by the machine itself – whether it’s properly or

poorly designed, and whether it is well functioning or dysfunctional. It will turn

out that the possibilities for improvement on the systemic level are enormous:

those large-scale ‘machineries’ we are talking about have never been

designed; oddly, the intensive waves of innovation that gave Information Age

its name have so far been focused only on individual nuts and specific bolts;

they have entirely ignored the whole thing – the way those nuts and bolts are

put together.

As the following example might illustrate, the ‘winning stakes’ in this Game-

Changing Game are uncommonly large, even for a new wave of innovation.

Systemic innovation in journalism and academic research

At the workshop “Co-Creating an Innovation Ecosystem for Good Journalism,”

which Knowledge Federation organized in Barcelona last November, a zeroversion

plan for a radically changed public informing has been created. Its

details are now being developed within Knowledge Federation. In this

designed systemic solution, journalists collaborate with academic researchers,

the ‘crowd’ and other stakeholders, by using recently created collaborative

knowledge-work technology, to co-create – and then operate – media

information as it might be needed to enable contemporary democracy to

tackle contemporary challenges. The details of this scheme are provided in a

separate document [2]. What I would like to highlight here is the shadow this

new way of organizing knowledge work might cast upon the conventional

practice, where the vast proportion of the knowledge created in academia

remains locked in academic specializations or ‘silos,’ while the journalists seek

for the next sensation that will attract the attention of their readers...

The Game-Changing Game has so far been played in the manner of positional

chess: By making 'moves' that make other good 'moves' possible or more

likely to succeed. In a recent letter, I have illustrated the nature of the 'position'

we are in after Barcelona as follows:

I remember this brief story from one of my first school books: The

grandmother prepared a ‘remedy’ for a sick boy, which consisted of a frog

leg – so that the sickness would spring out of his body, and seven pebbles –

so that it may jump over seven mountains etc. Then his mother gave him a

real medicine, and the boy recovered quickly.

I mention this story because it illustrates the notion of a paradigm: if you

happen to see some part of our conventional social reality in similar terms as

you see that grandmother’s ‘remedy,’ then you might be on the track of a new

paradigm. At my recent lecture in Europe House Zagreb, which you attended,

I showed how Knowledge Federation is developing a new paradigm in

knowledge work as a whole. We are not claiming that the sciences are like

that grandmother’s ‘remedy;’ and even the commercial journalism has its place

and its reason for existence. It is, however, not difficult to see that the whole

thing – specialized, isolated sciences, journalism whose aim is to attract

attention... – is neither the best way to take advantage of human talent and of

technology, nor a ‘collective mind’ that can give meaning and direction to an

advanced civilization.

This letter was addressed to Iva Ra⌃ica, a gifted third-year student who leads

eSTUDENT’s Team for International Cooperation. eSTUDENT is a student

excellence network at the University of Zagreb, which includes students from

Economics, EECS and Mathematics and Natural Sciences. I wrote this letter as

part of a dialog, through which some of the forthcoming moves in the Game-

Changing Game are being prepared:

• I am proposing to create in Zagreb a mini- student version of the “Innovation

Ecosystem for Good Journalism,” which was created in Barcelona. The

eSTUDENT organization already has the required kinds of expertise, only

journalism is missing. Professor Nenad Prelog, who leads the study of

journalism in Zagreb, and I have already talked about creating a project with

eSTUDENTs where also his students would also participate.

• To streamline the process of putting the results of this development into

actual practice, we are organizing a Startup Weekend in mid-September,

where we will design and put into practice suitable entrepreneurial

undertakings, as explained below.

• Through the IUC Dubrovnik, more concretely through the already planned

Knowledge Federation-staged course “Systemic Innovation for Collective

Creativity” we would ‘internationalize’ the mentioned project.

• I know I am not alone in desiring a (academic, entrepreneurial and cultural)

scheme where the young people are developing elements of global positive

change. Already in Spring 2012 we will begin contacting potential sponsors.

Systemic innovation in entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship streamlines human and other resources to provide benefits

to society and jobs and wealth to participants, by creating new impulses in

business. Reportedly, however (owing to the obvious difficulty to find yet

another gadget that fits into the existing scheme of things, and which has not

yet been invented) entrepreneurship has often resulted in ‘new shaving razor

with four blades’–type of entrepreneurial ideas.

Systemic innovation, backed by the Game-Changing Game, offers to

entrepreneurs the first-mover advantages in a completely new game. the

following metaphor might illustrate the nature of those advantages:

While an investment into oil drilling and gas stations would make little

sense in a world where the only means of transportation is the horse, it

made lots of sense in the world where Ford had just undertaken to

mass-produce automobiles. Systemic innovation in any domain offers

similar first-mover advantages to its participants.

Hence the project that Knowledge Federation may now begin in Zagreb is

also an instance of systemic innovation in entrepreneurship.

The knowledge federation approach to systemic innovation

What we have just seen illustrates a particular approach to systemic

innovation, which we are calling ‘knowledge federation.’ Political federation

brings together formerly independent political units in a way that preserves

their identity and part of their autonomy. Knowledge federation organizes

various actors in knowledge work (scientists, journalists, students,

entrepreneurs...) in an analogous way.

What I find particularly attractive about the project we are proposing to begin

in Zagreb is that its goal is to design a single, concrete system (an ‘innovation

ecosystem for good journalism’), and yet its outcomes are systemic

innovations in all major components of knowledge work: journalism, research,

education, entrepreneurship and governance. Through this act of systemic

innovation, those areas are brought into a harmonious, synergistic

relationships with one another; each of them benefits from all others.

Notes

[1] See the translation of Drago Pilsel’s article “Knowledge

Federation” (subtitle: “What will the creation of knowledge look like in the

future?”in Croatian Novi List of Dec. 7, 2008) at http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~dino/

KF/NL2008.pdf

[2] See “An innovation ecosystem for good journalism” – synopsis given in the

detailed view (right-hand column) of http://debategraph.org/IEforGJ