Socio-Technical Innovation Bundles for Agri-Food Systems Transformation

This open access book is the result of an expert panel convened by the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability and Nature Sustainability. The panel tackled the seventeen UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030 head-on, with respect to the global systems that produce and distribute food. The panel’s rigorous synthesis and analysis of existing research leads compellingly to multiple actionable recommendations that, if adopted, would simultaneously lead to healthy and nutritious diets, equitable and inclusive value chains, resilience to shocks and stressors, and climate and environmental sustainability

An overview on strategic design for socio-technical innovation

Nowadays, we are living in an environment of uncertainties and constant transformation. The innovation process is reverted, thereby, from the top-down to the bottom-up logic, where the stakeholders are invited to participate in the process of creating innovation. In that sense, socio-technical innovation implies a process of systemic change, both in the productive structure and in the relations between actors inside the system, with technical and behavioral implications, which affects production, distribution and consumption. A model that may simplify the complexity of such processes is the Multi-Level-Perspective (MLP), which considers the interactions between niches (micro level), socio-technical regimes (meso level), and landscapes (macro level). The MLP shows that, in order to change the landscape effectively, we have to start from the bottom, in other words, the socio-technical regimes open opportunities to receive innovations from the niches, small social groups, and communities. This way, we propose a simple framework of four main steps for the strategic management of the design process to develop Sociotechnical Innovations. A key point is considering that technological development and the relations among the actors involved in innovation is the way to improve the performance of innovation, to increase the possibilities of adoption and to generate the desired impact.Keywords: sociotechnical innovation, co-design, Multi-Level-Perspective, participatory design

Networked Transitions: Policy Coordination in Socio-Technical Innovation Systems

Governments worldwide increasingly address challenges, such as climate change or sustainability transitions, through mission-oriented innovation policies, i.e. systemic policies that cut across sectors to target a societal problem. Achieving such missions requires socio-technical change and often results in so-called multi-technology innovations: technologies that comprise a set of complex, interacting sub-technologies of diverse characters and cater a multitude of socio-technical purposes. These innovations pose a challenge: They trigger coordination problems across policy domains, across government organisations with different interests, capacities, and mandates, as well as across policy design and implementation. However, although coordination problems are not new to public policy scholars, they remain largely unaddressed in the innovation policy context. Likewise, the innovation studies literature hardly considers the influence of public agencies in innovation systems. Combined, this merits the research question: How do public sector organisations and socio-technical innovation systems mutually shape each other, particularly in the context of mission-oriented policies? This thesis investigates the innovation systems of autonomous vehicles as an example of a multi-technology solution resulting from mission-oriented policies in three highly innovative economies: Singapore, Estonia, and Sweden. Relying on network analyses, semi-structured interviews, and process-tracing, it compares how hierarchical, market-based, and network-oriented policy coordination arrangements shape the public administration’s impact on the innovation system and vice-versa. In conclusion, socio-technical innovations, due to the challenges they trigger, shift policy coordination arrangements towards (intensified) network-oriented approaches. Accordingly, government organisations collaborate to enable the innovation system, rather than controlling it top-down or through market-based arrangements. ‘Networked transitions’, hence, allow systemic feedback loops to integrate policy design and implementation, to mitigate coordination failures, and to accelerate the system’s development towards fulfilling ‘the mission’

Socio-Technical Innovation Bundles for Agri-Food Systems Transformation

This open access book is the result of an expert panel convened by the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability and Nature Sustainability. The panel tackled the seventeen UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030 head-on, with respect to the global systems that produce and distribute food. The panel’s rigorous synthesis and analysis of existing research leads compellingly to multiple actionable recommendations that, if adopted, would simultaneously lead to healthy and nutritious diets, equitable and inclusive value chains, resilience to shocks and stressors, and climate and environmental sustainability

Digital Socio-Technical Innovation and Indigenous Knowledge

Scientific research involving remote rural communities is often plagued by a lack of understanding of what constitutes indigenous knowledge. That is, indigenous perspectives, models of representation, and their ways of knowing. Through a long-standing community-university partnership in working with remote and rural communities in the Borneo Malaysian states of Sarawak and Sarawak and the Orang Asli communities in Peninsular Malaysia, we address this concern in presenting directions for shaping digital socio-technical innovation. We highlight the need to adopt a balanced indigenous worldview based on two case studies from past interactions with these indigenous communities to highlight how indigenous knowledge can now become contextualized within contemporary problem-solving scenarios

Digital Socio-Technical Innovation and Indigenous Knowledge

Scientific research involving remote rural communities is often plagued by a lack of understanding of what constitutes indigenous knowledge. That is, indigenous perspectives, models of representation, and their ways of knowing. Through a long-standing community-university partnership in working with remote and rural communities in the Borneo Malaysian states of Sarawak and Sarawak and the Orang Asli communities in Peninsular Malaysia, we address this concern in presenting directions for shaping digital socio-technical innovation. We highlight the need to adopt a balanced indigenous worldview based on two case studies from past interactions with these indigenous communities to highlight how indigenous knowledge can now become contextualized within contemporary problem-solving scenarios

Socio-technical innovation in community-based tourism organizations: A proposal for local development

Socio-technical innovation is based on new patterns of interaction involving a set of new behaviors that have been legitimized in a given context. The approach of socio-technical innovation complements a purely technological innovation focus. However, studies of how to address social and environmental challenges under this approach are scarce. The aim of this paper is to identify the technical and social structures that underpin the socio-technical innovation system of community-based tourism organizations (CBTOs). This paper offers an in-depth case study of a specific type of collective property known as an “ejido”. Through this case study, the paper highlights the aspects that have allowed these organizations not only to meet the needs of the tourism market but also to tackle both human challenges (food, education, well-being, and empowerment) and environmental issues. The results enrich the discussion of stakeholder collaboration and showcase an efficient type of organization that helps meet economic, social, and environmental needs. A key contribution of the study is to provide evidence of the relationship between technical and social systems. This relationship reveals the strong interrelationship between these two systems, which feed off each other to drive the social change of the CBTO. Another contribution is the characterization of the socio-technical innovation system in ejidos

A framework for socio-technical innovation: the case of a human-powered shredder

Abstract: Please refer to full text to view abstrac

What Influences the Diffusion of Grassroots Innovations for Sustainability? Investigating Community Currency Niches

Community action for sustainability is a promising site of socio-technical innovation. Here we test the applicability of co-evolutionary niche theories of innovation diffusion (Strategic Niche Management, SNM) to the context of ‘grassroots innovations’. We present new empirical findings from an international study of 12 community currency niches (such as LETS, time banks, local currencies). These are parallel systems of exchange, designed to operate alongside mainstream money, meeting additional sustainability needs. Our findings confirm SNM predictions that niche-level activity correlates with diffusion success, but we highlight additional or confounding factors, and how niche theories might be adapted to better fit civil-society innovations. In so doing, we develop a model of grassroots innovation niche diffusion which builds on existing work and tailors it to this specific context. The paper concludes with a series of theoretically-informed recommendations for practitioners and policymakers to support the development and potential of grassroots innovations