Three Examples of Systems Innovation that Will Help you Understand What it is

As a brief introduction, systems innovation represents a new set of ideas on how to enable transformational innovation within complex systems. More than just changing our thinking it also offers new methods and tools on how to apply these ideas towards tackling wicked challenges through an innovation-driven approach. It is innovation but not as we know it. Innovation as we know is innovation in parts, when more and more people are starting to ask could there be such a thing as innovation in systems??

To give you an understanding of what this might look like through examples, here are three ideas which navigate through systemic change.

Example 1: 15-minute city

The "15-minute city" is the idea that we may develop cities as communities where people can access all the services they need within just a 15 min walk. Many cities, including Paris, are working on implementing this structure in their cities. Traditional thinking about the design of cities has resulted in distributing out the functions of the city into separate parts, so that we could make those parts more efficient through mass production, e.g. residential areas, commercial areas, industrial zones, financial centre etc.?

The 15min city concept reverses this looking to improve the city through the integration of diverse activities and functions into the same location. This can be seen as a systemic approach to tackling such challenges as transport Co emissions or congestion in that it does not try to change the parts - e.g. cars - but change the structure of the system itself - the city.

Example 2: Glasgow City Violent Crime

Up until the early 2000s, Glasgow had a reputation as one of the most violent cities in Europe. The police had been taking a traditional approach to the issue for decades - with little success - focusing on the parts of the system, looking at the young men as criminals and aiming to punish them. In 2005, senior police officer McCluskey and the Glasgow police set up a Violence Reduction Unit. The initiative takes a “public health approach” to violence, this means dealing with it more like a disease to deal with the underlying structural aspects rather than the symptoms. Rather than responding to incidents once they had happened, the city started to look at preventing the spread of violence in the first place.?

They started to frame the challenge in new ways, seeing the issue as systemic, involving many different interacting factors. McCluskey started to form a coalition with partners in housing, health, education, employment and family support services, as well as local community groups and businesses. Together they created a more effective way to intervene early, working with families, to prevent young men from being attracted to a culture of violence at the same time looking to give them more attractive alternatives.

Example 3: Mexico City Water System

During the 20th century Mexico city built an industrial linear water system to provide for its inhabitants via large aquifers. When it rains a complicated system of pipes and pumps moves the water out of the city and then it is pumped back in for usage. In 2017 the city experienced a major earthquake that seriously damaged pipes and flooded the city, 4 million people were cut off from clean water. One organisation started to develop a rain harvesting system in the poor neighbourhood of Xochimilco. They built a decentralised system of low-tech basins and plumbing to capture water falling and channel it into homes. Citizens were now able to trade it locally peer-to-peer to build water resilience in the location. The result was the building of new connections, a new economy of water and a new system that was more resilient, replacing scarcity and dependence with abundance of water.?

This is an excerpt from a set of video tutorials I produced walking people through these and more examples, you can find that on our site https://bit.ly/SiCourseList