Systemic Innovation: a discussion series

A 'how to' for System Innovation: a starting place for practitioners

Anna Birney - 19.03.2013

The following is a guest blog from Anna Birney, Head of System Innovation Lab, Forum for the Future.

Turning conceptual frameworks into guides for practice

If we need a way to shift systems so that they are more resilient, equitable and sustainable, conceptual frameworks and analysis of what is out there can get us only so far. We, as self-appointed change agents, need to find practical methods, tools and approaches to start to interact with systems and enable system innovation. 

At Forum for the Future we have been exploring what these approaches might look like and applying them to our projects and work with partners. We have now created a framework for system innovation to collate the wide variety of existing approaches in order to help ourselves and other practitioners find their route to change and be a starting place for a deeper conversation with others.

What are the steps to change?

Building from the ideas of systems thinking, socio-technical transition theory, transition management and innovation studies we have created our Six Steps for significant change.

System innovation happens in the middle of this change cycle and includes diagnosing the system through to the point at which the change has momentum and is starting to tip. These steps are often the hardest to understand and therefore overlooked by change agents as it is difficult to see where to start and how to grow the impact to a wider system of actors.  However this is also where the magic can happen and is critical for achieving a long-lasting impact.

Approaches to system innovation

Forum for the Future use these to create a variety of different programmes and projects to catalyse system innovation combing these three steps of diagnose, pioneering and scaling up - that follow steps 2,3, and 4.  

Systems diagnosis - critical to laying the ground for innovation: In Dairy 2020 Forum for the Future bought together organisations right across the supply chain. Together we co-created possible future scenarios for the dairy industry. Using these, the group agreed a vision for a sustainable dairy industry, and developed a framework of guiding principles for how we can get there. We have found that using futures is both a great way to establish the current state of the system but also to engage with potential participants so that are ready to act together. 

As well as futures scenarios we use other systemic inquiry methods that include sustainability frameworks, systems maps and people centred research that engage people and helps them to understand the nature of the challenge and make choices about where to start innovating. The most important element of this step is taking a systems thinking approach which then can be carried forward through all your actions and projects.

We have found in our Collaborative Futures processes such as Diary 2020 and the Sustainability Shipping Initiative processes that spend longer at this diagnosis stage can build a strong core group act as an attractor to other participants.   Senior level engagement as well as relationship and trust building can sustain the group through to scaling up the change, we have found experienced facilitation invaluable to achieving this. 

Rapid innovation across different parts of the system: In Wired for Change we are bringing the digital innovators together to tackle sustainability challenges.  The community is armed with tools that enable fast prototyping and testing, which can bring the new ideas required to instigate system innovation. Bringing different perspectives and a fast coalition together around a problem can help unleash the power required for system innovation. 

Through our innovation projects we have found that working at a systems level means we need to pay more attention to the mix of types of innovations that include products and services but also ideas, new mindsets, behaviours and business models as well as instigating a number of experiments and work streams in different areas.  This is what we are doing in the Sustainable Shipping Initiative and we have found it is crucial to create a support structure around these coalition innovation work streams so as to move towards implementation and scale.

Scale is accelerated through combining multiple approaches:  In the Community Energy Coalition we used a select of the different pathways to scale (listed below) to create a coalition committed to promote community energy with members and wider stakeholders. The vision was launched in February 2012 at a roundtable meeting on delivering community energy with the signatories and the UK Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change

• Inspire and enable Influencers
• Communication & behaviour change
• Networks and collaboration
• Incubate and accelerate entrepreneurs & technologies
• New financial models, measures and standards
• Barrier removal - including policy and advocacy

We have found that diffusion is the process that underpins scaling up of change, where an idea is grown, replicated and has a process by which it is starting to spread through a variety of different routes, from individual influencers and behaviour change to addressing issues of lock-in to current system behaviours through infrastructure, policy and financial mechanisms.

It's only the beginning

As practitioners of system innovation we constantly have to make tough choices, for example about system boundaries, on where to have leverage and who and how to best engage people and start and grow change.  Navigating the systemic landscape, of different people and organisations with some of the toolkit described here is only the beginning.  It requires us to think in systems, question our assumptions and continually learn the skill of and practice system innovation. At Forum we are keen to hear what you are doing so that we can get better at describing the process of system innovation, what works and what doesn't and to work together to create a better future.

(The views in this blog are the author's own and not necessarily those of Nesta)

About the Forum for the Future Lab

The Forum Lab is where we learn about, experiment with and share how we can do system innovation better and with greater impact http://www.forumforthefuture.org/the-lab