Towards the
Societal System of Innovation;
the Case of
Metropolitan Areas in Europe
Serdar Türkeli & René Wintjes
UNU-MERIT, Maastricht University
26 November 2014
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• Initial question: Why are innovation policies
addressing societal challenges more common in
Local Metropolitan innovation strategies?
• Cases include: awards for social innovations;
Enable Berlin (open-design platform); incubators for
social entrepreneurship (Munich); social innovation
Safari (A’dam), bootcamps, smart city initiatives,
living labs, Collective Awareness Platforms & Open
data.
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• Societal challenges & innovative solutions are very
contextual;
• Concentrated supply and demand for solutions to
societal challenges;
• Metropolitan area’s serve as ‘living labs’ and ‘lead
markets’ for applied solutions;
• Many different actors are involved and contribute to
the initiatives, beyond triple-helix partners: also
includes citizens/end-users & public sector;
• Different worlds which have their own motives,
routines, capabilities and institutions
• Many actors have multiple roles and identities,
operate in multiple domains, and multiple levels
(innovation sub-systems)
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What kind of innovation system concept applies?
• Existing concepts of innovation systems only focus
on one specific challenge, objective (stand-alone)
• In territorial systems of innovation (National and
Regional systems of Innovation) innovation serves
economic growth;
• Other ‘single-issue’ innovation-systems include:
technological, sectoral and social innovation
systems;
• Each policy-field/silo develops its own system;
• The new varieties and combinations from
interactions between these sub-systems are not
captured and explained
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System of societal innovation
Regional/
local
challenges/
innovation
Environm
ental
challenge/
innovation
Global
challenge/
innovation
Societal Innovation
System
Public
sector
challenge/
innovation
Social
innovation
/challenge
Private
Sector
challenge/
innovation
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System of societal innovation
Regional/
local
Systems
/actors
Global &
National
Systems/
actors
Social
Innovation
Systems/
Societal Innovation
actors
System
Technolo
gical
Systems
/actors
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Sectoral
Systems/
actors
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• In the daily ‘life-world’ context a multiplicity of
actors who want to shape the future, are active in
multi-scale and multiplex networks and select local
interactive processes.
• Innovation and innovation systems are not only
instrumental for economic benefits in a systemtechnocratic sense, but also for addressing
societal challenges in a grassrootscommunicative sense.
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• Societal transformative power largely comes from
organising interactions between the special-case
(single issue/stand-alone) innovation sub-systems.
• Over-embeddedness or lacking interactions among
these sub-systems cannot capture evolving
contextuality (life-world) for innovation.
• This shortcoming provides a complementary
policy rationale for organizing widened
interactions (S2S, system-to-system; G2G,
grassroots-to-grassroots), and deepened
contextuality (S2G, systems-to-grassroots; and
G2S, grassroots-to-systems).
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Organise communication at grass-roots level: policy
pitches
• For social innovations, scale defines whether further
systemic policy instruments would be needed or
not.
• where the pitched policies are induced ideas and
initiatives, and organizing the pitching is the
policy instrument.
• They are not financial incentive- or informationbased tools, but they provide platform infrastructure
and societal spaces,
• it enables to communicate challenges, search for
creative contributions, raise funds via crowdfunding, grant-making or sponsoring; and serves as
a social assessment/valorisation of the innovation.
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Transformative scaling: from policy pitch to policy
instrument
(60: Bradach and Grindle
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The Societal System of Innovation and empirical cases
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The Societal System of Innovation and its generalized framework towards policy
instrument design
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Interaction between regional and sectoral system of
innovation: smart specialization strategies
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Interaction between Sectoral and Technological
Systems in Industrial strategies
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Interaction between Production and adoption in
Socio-Technical Systems
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Thanks
[email protected]
[email protected]
Acknowledgement:
FP7 SIMPACT, grant agreement no: 613411
Regional Innovation Monitor, Contract No. ENTR/09/32
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