Admired Disorder: A Guide to Building Innovation Ecosystems

Innovation requires supportive innovation ecosystems. This book is about building innovation ecosystems and improving existing ones. These have the character of complex adaptive systems. Innovation ecosystems do not just happen; they need to be engineered. Cases and examples in the book of how to engineer innovation ecosystems illustrate widely applicable fundamentals. No previous knowledge of complexity is assumed.

Innovation requires supportive innovation ecosystems. This book is about building innovation ecosystems and improving existing ones. These have the character of complex adaptive systems. Innovation ecosystems do not just happen; they need to be engineered. Cases and examples in the book of how to engineer innovation ecosystems illustrate widely applicable fundamentals. No previous knowledge of complexity is assumed. Innovation ecosystems are systems of people usually in organizations behaving as normal non-rational beings, making decisions, experiencing successes and failure, learning, and living. An innovation ecosystem is a complex system of connections and relationships among people and their environment. We call these Rainforests or complex adaptive systems. This book applies complex adaptive systems and Rainforest Thinking to building innovation ecosystems. Understanding such systems helps deliver economic and social benefits: entrepreneurship, new business opportunities, workforce utilization, exports, investment, quality of life, prosperity, and more in a holistic, positive manner; and, most importantly, a robust innovation culture. Strategic planning and planning strategies change when the environment is a mix of certainty and uncertainty, as in complex adaptive systems.

Alistair M. Brett has over 30 years of international consulting experience in some 15 developed and developing countries around the globe, specializing in commercializing science and technology, and developing support mechanisms for technology commercialization from universities and research centers. Alistair focuses on how understanding innovation ecosystems as complex adaptive systems not only opens up the large volume of research on such systems but also help to analyze, design, create, and maintain, support for innovation in businesses, organizations, regions, and countries. He is the co-founder of the Center for Technology Commercialization and the Center's graduate tech-nology management degree programs at the Academy of National Economy in Moscow, Russia. He has some 20 years of experience in higher education administration. Alistair is also a senior consultant to The World Bank. He holds a B.Sc. in Physics from the University of London, and a Ph.D. in Theoreti-cal Physics, from the University of St. Andrews (Scotland), and Drexel University (USA).