White Spaces Innovation in Sweden - Innovation policy for ... - Vinnova

WHITE SPACES INNOVATION IN SWEDENgovernance are dependent on the rationale for intervention/action. If the focus is ontransactions and exploitation then companies are well positioned to be orchestrators.Those forms of governance that strive to shape and “co-ordinate” frames and lead toinnovation of meaning require more of public/civic governance and/or self-organisationresponsive to external constraints.A process model for making Grand Challenges actionableCollaborative governance in this particular context is about aligning issues, actors, (includingusers), processes and assets to develop and deliver products. Figure 5-5 illustratesthe “content” of orchestration. The basic premise is that a grand challenge has tobe interpreted and framed in a collaborative process to be made actionable. The eventlogic illustrated there is that the Grand Challenges are defined at a societal level. Theway they are framed in that perspective is most often not a framing that is actionable.There is a need for issues to be interpreted and translated by constellations of stakeholders.Because they are so complex or wicked the process of making them actionable in ameaningful way must meet certain requirements in terms of how the process of interpretationis orchestrated and who should be involved in the process. This is captured by thedesign arrow between issues and actors. We saw in chapter 4 that design thinking isemerging as a fruitful approach to cope with complexity in such a way that differinginterpretations and intentions can be represented and lead to a shared interpretation thatis meaningful and actionable. The typical feature of applying design thinking is to workwith visualisation of ideas and concepts and use prototypes that are provisional but“testable”. This means that many views, perspectives and constraints are shaped into a“totality” and iteratively given more precise and detailed features. Using a concept fromcommunications theory these prototypes can function as boundary objects that allowconversation and sense-making between actors with very diverse backgrounds. As weshowed in chapter 4 theatre may also be used to open for interaction and sense-making.However, this initial shared interpretation defines a community of stakeholders withdifferent concrete meaning for different subgroups, individual companies, businessnetworks, clusters or business ecosystems. So design thinking is given more precisecontent in various contexts because different types of users may be involved as oneexample or that business models differ (e.g. sustainable cities versus personalisedhealthcare). The term interaction fields is being used to label these different contextsand is shown by the vertical arrow linking actors to products in Fig 5-5. The word isselected to stress that in situations where there are shared problems and where thereexist interdependencies between actors, interaction is a key for coordinated action (coaction)to deliver solutions that may be innovations. From an orchestration or governanceperspective interaction can be based on self-organisation, network managementor contractual relationships as in a strategic alliance. It may also be so that this type ofdealing with complexity could be useful for designing a relevant policy mix instead ofhoping for ministries/governments to sort this out in administrative fashion. Having this105