The transition to a sustainable society, in line with UN Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), has emerged as one of the most significant socio-economic endeavours of our generation. Considering the increasingly complex structural challenges and uncertainty arising from pandemics, poverty, rapid technology developments, and war, along with the consequences of climate change, there is a growing awareness of the need for more systemic transformations of our economies and societies. This will not only require that consumption and production patterns become more sustainable (SDG 12) but, perhaps more importantly, that these efforts are somehow coordinated to enforce one another, leveraging emerging opportunities, while at the same time mitigating and addressing potential socio-economic risks and challenges.
Addressing these increasingly complex challenges will require innovation at an unprecedented scale (SDG 9). More importantly, it will require transformative innovation, which adds a new dimension to our understanding of innovation itself. In this context, innovation is not only about new products, services, processes, and methodologies for everyday challenges. It is also expected to support and accelerate larger transformations in and of society at large including changes in behaviours and mindsets. This means that any effort to stimulate innovation, in addition to technology development and innovation management, also will have to consider the surrounding ecosystem’s capacity to assimilate and contribute to innovation. This ambition is to promote an adaptive society, capable of assimilating and promoting innovation for its proper transformation. This implies developing supporting framework conditions, new and appropriate incentives, along with allocating alternative capacities and resources both in the public as well as the private sector.
This implies that transformative innovation policy adds to our traditional ways of thinking about innovation. It is not only about addressing competitiveness and growth, but it is also expected to intentionally contribute to a transformation of society and the economy. This also broadens the scope of transformative innovation policy to a global endeavor.
There is a growing need for concerted and structured dialogues on these issues. How does this ambition to transform entire systems change the way we understand and promote innovation? What new policies and measures are needed to spur transformative innovation that accelerates a sustainable transition of our societies in line with UN Agenda 2030 and the SDGs? What are the opportunities and challenges in this process? What types of integrated learning processes and frameworks, evaluating past experiences while simultaneously pursuing foresight activities, can support experimentation that accelerates societal transformation in a complex environment?
Responding to this clear need for concerted, structured dialogue, tools, and joint initiatives, the UN-ECE Transformative Innovation Network (ETIN) is organizing the Transformative Innovation Action Forum. This is a jointly organized by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission, and the Directorate-General for Research and Innovation. This event will bring together a broad range of representatives from government, the private sector, academia and research to discuss the main challenges and opportunities in facilitating innovation for socio-technical transformations towards sustainable development. This Action Forum will benefit from the work conducted by ETIN on ecosystem development and strategic learning for transformative innovation, as well as the work on systems dynamics and place-based innovation conducted by JRC.
Discussions and input to the Action Forum will also be aligned with the insights and outcomes of the “Engagement Week 2024: Scaling Experimentation – A Catalyst For Transformative System Change” organized by ETIN partner, the Transformative Innovation Policy Consortium (TIPC), and the Deep Transitions Lab on 18-20 September 2024.
ETIN and the Action Forum are funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK) of Germany.