Building a Creative Ecosystem to Tackle the Most Complex Challenges

If you step back and look at the history of innovation practices, it quickly becomes clear that there isn't just one type of innovation problem and that there isn't one 'best' innovation practice.  Over the last 50 years, a series of different approaches to innovation have been developed, each tailored to the major creative challenges of the day.  

Today, where complex messy real world challenges are front and center, the practice of Ecosystem Innovation is rapidly emerging as the next generation of innovation practice.   It's an approach that's designed for creating solutions where many different people, organization, technology and resources must work together.  

The need for this kind of ambitious innovation is particularly pressing in the aid sector, where almost every challenge is complex and messy.  To take on these hard problems aid sector innovators need to embrace a more powerful form of innovation, a 'third generation' of innovation that is designed for this work.   

This requires more than just a change in thinking, or in the hands on work of innovation teams.   In this report developed for the Global Alliance of Humanitarian Innovation (GAHI) I make the case that an entire ecosystem of support must be developed to support the unique effort that must go into complex ecosystem innovation.

While this report was originally written to address the challenges of building effective aid sector innovation support, the big ideas are broadly applicable to the needs of ecosystem innovators working in business and the public sector.   

Innovation 3.0 - Building a Creative Ecosystem to Tackle Aid's Most Complex Challenges