Innovation and emergence

//TRENDS//
Innovation: the emergent world we live in
Alberto Cottica

D4SB Master Course

From opportunity assessment to business planning in social business
Lesson 5

giovedì 31 marzo 2011

What is
INNOVATION?


Everyone thinks of artefacts....


... but it is people who give meaning to them.


A complexity approach: innovation happens in agent-artefact space


Example: the book

• in the 15th century manuscripts
are large and heavy

• exquisitely decorated

• almost solely about religion

• heavily commented

• to read, you’d wear your best
clothes, set them on a stand
and read aloud

• handcopied by scribes


Example: the book

• enter Gutenberg (and his
investor, Fust)

• he needs to invent around
some technical problems that
require metalwork skills

• goal: printing faster and
cheaper manuscripts (and
indulgences)

• 1450: success!


But then...

• Fust and Schoeffer have extra
copies, so they invent the
publishing industry...

• ...and advertisement (1469)

• Aldus Manutius invents the
pocket book: smaller, cheaper,
portable, uncommented, with a
clean italic font (1490s)

• Pietro Bembo invents
punctuation, the introduction
(and the Italian language! 1501)

• modern reading is born, as
culture democratizes


Technologically
determined adoption

50,0

8° FOL. 4° 12° FOL. 4° 8°
Ita Ita Ita Ita Lat Lat Lat

37,5

25,0
%

12,5

0
15

15

15

15

15

15

15

15

15

15
00

11

21

31

41

51

61

71

81

91
-
-1

-3

-4

-5

-6

-7

-8

-9

-1
20
0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

60
0
Council of Trent
The Venetian book,
Socially determined “adoption”
language and format

Exaptive bootstrapping dynamics

organizational transformation

new patterns of
new artifact interaction

new attribution of functionality

Innovation is emergent


It happens in the
context of relationships

Its engine is diversity
(but not too much)

Social business and social
innovation are emergent too

60

45

% of working-age population

30

% of population ages 65 and above

15

0
1960 1962 1964 1966 1968 1970 1972 1974 1976 1978 1980 1982 1984 1986 1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008

Opportunities emerge from
the crisis of the welfare state

...build competitiveness by What is a schoolbus?
generating new attributions...

1985 2009

...and have far-reaching unexpected effects!

Assignments!

• Identify at least one innovation in social business and discuss in terms of
attributional shifts

• Try to discover the context in which the idea ﬁrst surfaced. Was there a
generative relationship? If so, who were the main characters?

• write a blog post/wikipedia entry on your understanding of the role of
innovation in social business. How important is it? Has it always be as
important as now, or has it been more or less important in the past than now?
And why?


Reading list

• For a theory of innovation broadly consistent with the lecture: D. Lane,
Innovation and complexity. In D. Lane et. al., “Complexity Perspectives to
Innovation and Social Change”, 2010

• For examples of social innovation: www.thebigsociety.co.uk/big-society-in-
action


Legal stuff
This work is licensed under the Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this
license, visit http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to
Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite
300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.
All photos licensed CC on Flickr.com. Authors (top to bottom):
500CPM, Lorena, Bachir, Clio1789,, promaine, paulbence,
Alastair Montgomery


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