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