Transformative Innovation - A Guide to Practice and Policy for System Transition

Innovation is a necessity in a changing world. But what kind of innovation?
Sustaining innovation fixes what’s failing. Disruptive innovation shakes
things up. Only transformative innovation can deliver a fundamental shift
towards new patterns of viability in tune with our aspirations for the future.
Typically, disruptive initiatives make only a short-term impact or are
eventually ‘mainstreamed’ to help sustain existing systems. That is
particularly true in the public, social, cultural and civic sectors (for which
this book is written) where no natural patterns of renewal are in place.
This is a stand-alone, practical guide to realizing transformative potential
at scale. It offers six elements for policymakers, funders and innovators:
• Knowing: how to expand our sense of what constitutes valid
knowledge to become more comfortable with complexity
• Imagining: how to conceive, develop and design transformative
initiatives to carry a group’s longer term aspirations
• Being: how to organise for action, manage the process, and sustain
the people involved over time
• Doing: how to introduce the new in the presence of the old, enrol
others and figure out what to do when you don’t know what to do
• Enabling: how to construct a policy framework for long-term
transition and provide smart financing to match
• Supporting: how to develop systems and structures to support a
culture of renewal in our public, social and civic systems.
It ends with an invitation to join a growing community of transformative
innovators around the world – a network of hope in powerful times.