Notes on Sustainable and Equitable Solutions in Complex Spaces of Innovation

1. Offerings and Rituals

In most big cities in the United States, bike sharing has become a widely adopted service. It is offered as the result of public-private partnerships to expand the menu of options for urban mobility. We are already accustomed to people using their cell phones to pay for rides, unlock bikes from dock stations, and travel on dedicated bike lanes guided by navigation maps. The reason why such routine behavior is seamless is because it is supported by well-integrated, programmed, and reliable networks of products, services, spaces, and data flows: infrastructure. Information about the location of available bikes is cross-referenced with the rider’s locations, credit card payment automatically unlocks the bike, and dedicated bike lanes indicate safe and protected routes. These infrastructures generate protocols and rules of dos and don'ts, thereby creating routine behavior and rituals. As this example demonstrates, contemporary daily life is transactional because it is shaped by how individual and collective actions seamlessly combine and use existing infrastructures and its protocols.

2. Offerings and Coalitions

A closer observation of someone riding on a bike-sharing service might reveal that the rider is also using a health monitoring and tracking wearable device. Heartbeats are being measured, as well as the speed and distance of the ride. This dataset is added wirelessly in real-time to a database and compared to other sources to produce meaningful findings and personalized recommendations. If authorized, a doctor or personal trainer could have access to this information to recommend adjustments for a treatment or a wellness program. It could be that the rider is a member of a social support group for fighting obesity.?Such a scenario illustrates that daily life transactions have been aggregated to create coalitions of offerings. While bike sharing, health care, and social networks are independent offerings–each with its transactions and protocols – they are increasingly collaborating and developing coalitions supported by autonomous integration.?Consequently, daily life transactions are interconnected because they result from an autonomous and seamless integration of offerings from multiple organizations.

3. Offerings and Organizational Boundaries

The protocol of unlocking a bike from a dock station through an electronic payment using a credit card requires that multiple organizations cooperate. Government city agencies, bike-sharing providers, financial companies, mobile, and wireless service providers, and cyber security services need to design the protocols to integrate and synchronize each of the transactions that shape contemporary daily life. This coalition of offerings that integrates products, services, spaces, and data flows creates interdependency among multiple organizations, limiting their ownership and independence of their own business. For example, ride traffic data are open source instead of owned by the bike-sharing service provider, as is the case with car-share services. Also, bikes are designed according to specifications for bike-sharing services and need to integrate features of other services sourced by other organizations. Consequently, when offers are integrated, organizations develop networks and coalitions, challenging the traditional understanding of their organizational boundaries.

4. Offering and Bias

Dock stations for bike sharing are now common urban artifacts placed in public spaces and distributed in multiple neighborhoods. Implementing a bike-sharing station at the corner of a street in a neighborhood installs not only a new artifact but also creates a hub that instantiates a new daily life transaction. It infuses a new infrastructure and protocols of do’s and don’ts shaped by the interconnectivity of offerings from multiple organizations. It activates the networks connecting mobile communication between riders and bike-sharing services, electronic payments through credit cards, surveillance of traffic patterns, and monitoring of personal health data. Consequently, when organizations instantiate new transactions through the integration of offerings, they set the parameters that condition who has and doesn’t have access to these offerings. While electronic payment through credit cards gives access to credit card holders, it discriminates against anyone with limited or no access to credit and financial services. While bikes are well-designed for adults, it discriminates against families with kids. By designing autonomous and seamless integration of offerings, these networks of distributed ownership tend to replicate and amplify the biases inputted into their infrastructures, transactions, and offerings.?Therefore, they reinforce privileges and discrimination, promoting unintended consequences.

5. Offerings and Change

The more we experience the emergence of these new infrastructures, transactions, and integrated offerings in multiple industries, such as mobility, health care, food, insurance, finance, waste, energy, housing, hospitality, and government, the more we learn from the consequences of designing autonomous and seamless integration of offerings through networks of distributed ownership. Like the bike-sharing example, local renewable energy consists of new infrastructures, transactions, and integrated offerings. It is based on renewable energy sources, such as solar power, that can be sourced and consumed locally. It requires the setup of new infrastructures, such as solar power panels and local grids, that instantiates a marketplace for residents to buy and sell energy locally. Through the affordances of blockchain technology, it enables the integration of offerings by activating networks of organizations with distributed ownership. It seamlessly connects energy-efficient appliances, government loans and incentives, energy providers, insurance companies, residents, and digital currency services. Consequently, this new energy system replicates and amplifies the biases inputted into their offerings. For example, the system privileges home ownership, amplifying the gap to access clean, renewable, and low-cost energy.?Through a better understanding of these developments, we are now learning that despite our best intentions, many new offerings promote disruptive changes, reinforce and amply bias, and diminish accountability from stakeholders.?

6. Offerings and Network Activation

While new offerings instantiate new individual and collective actions, they also disrupt well-established patterns of daily life. Corner streets with parking spaces and drive-thru services that used to serve car owners now have to adapt to a new group of bike riders with different attitudes and preferences regarding commuting and eating. Consequently, there is an increase in tension that balances well-established patterns of daily life and new behavior. With many new options for mobility in urban spaces, commuting has become significantly different from what it used to be a decade ago. As tension from change increases, more attention needs to be given to developing new offerings and how they disrupt patterns of daily life while shaping new ones.

While the success of new offerings depends on organizations crafting well-integrated and user-friendly products, services, spaces, and data flows, its focus on selected targeted user groups tends to amplify privileges at the expense of equity.?Designing payment transactions based on credit cards makes bike-sharing services easy and friendly as long as the user has a credit card and access to credit.?To increase access, bike-sharing services would need to offer other types of payments that do not rely on someone having access to credit, which is the case already with some bike-sharing services. Consequently, there is an increased demand for offerings that increase societal equity. With the emergence of many new forms of payment, financial transactions can now be inclusive and user-friendly simultaneously. As demand for equity increases, designing innovations to be human-centered is not enough. When designing new offerings, more thinking must be given to diversity, inclusion, and access.

Because new offerings depend on the interdependency among a coalition of organizations, ownership, and accountability over what is offered becomes fragmented and distributed. Considerations for bike rider safety become a shared responsibility when involving the bike's design, bike lanes, city policy, health insurance, navigation maps, bike riders, car riders, and pedestrians. To make bike-sharing rides safe, a coalition of organizations would need to expand their boundaries to account for this shared responsibility. Similarly, if reducing pollution in city centers were the goal, leaders would need to activate a network of organizations accountable for clean air. Consequently, there is an increase in awareness of the shared responsibility for societal goals. Thus, there is a need for systems-level transformation towards sustainable and equitable solutions that align individual, organizational, and societal goals. As demand for impact at scale increases, designing well-integrated offerings is not enough. More leadership needs to happen in activating networks and coalitions with a sense of ownership for large-scale transformation and impact.