Table 1 Assumptions and observations about core innovation concepts
Concept | Linear causal thinking | Systems thinking |
|---|---|---|
Ideas | One invention, operationalized | Reinvention, proliferation, reimplementation, discarding, and termination |
Innovator(s) | An entrepreneur with a fixed set of full-time people over time | Many entrepreneurs and other players, sometimes on-track and sometimes distracted, fluidly engaging and disengaging over time in a variety of roles |
Transaction | A defined network of people or firms working out details of an idea between themselves | Expanding, contracting, and flexing networks of partisan stakeholders who converge and diverge on ideas |
Context | The environment provides opportunities and constraints on the innovation process | The innovation process is captured by political and cultural features, and creates opponents or is constrained by multiple enacted environments |
Process | Simple, orderly, cumulative sequences of stages or phases | Multiple messy, imprecise journeys; many divergent, parallel and convergent paths; some related, others not |
Outcomes | Final result predictable; a stable new order comes into being | Final result indeterminate; many in-process perturbations, assessments and spinoffs; integration of any new order with old orders |