Lab log #20: What are innovation ecosystems and what to they have to do with wicked problems?

The international States of Change Learning Festival oriented around public innovation was organized in June 2020 for the first time. The festivals purpose is to be a plaform for new, emerging ideas. As part of the festival Sitra Lab organized a session around Innovation Ecosystems for Transformation on Wednesday 3.6.2020. The goal of the session was to explore innovation ecosystems as potential means of organizing around societal or global challenges.

The session brought together around 75 people from all over the world to share their thoughts and efforts related to the theme. Sitra Lab’s Mikael Seppälä spoke about innovation portfolios and their role as an enabler for innovation ecosystems. Different type of problems call for different types of organizations. The broader the problem, the broader should be the ecosystem that could tackle the problem.

Chief Innovation Officer Iina Oilinki from the Helsinki Metropolitan Smart & Clean Foundation spoke about the collaboration model they’ve developed to help orchestrate their innovation ecosystem. In her presentation she discussed their work related to the Closed Plastic Circle ecosystem where public, private and people collaborate to build the foundations to recycle and reuse plastic in the Helsinki metropolitan area.

Even though we can see the first global examples of innovation ecosystems in tackling wicked problems, time will tell whether we will see an increasing amount of these. As the discussion in the session showed us, there are still many unanswered questions related to these that we are trying to solve globally.

Watch the session recording:

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You can find the presentation slides here: