Our most pressing societal problems such as enhancing health care, developing alternate energy, revitalizing cities, and advancing the economy are complex innovation systems. Leveraging the enormous potential of sciences and technologies into better resolutions for these complex social and economic challenges requires a transformation in social technologies we use to tap into this potential. We can grapple with these complex innovation systems effectively only by taking advantage of emergence. This book articulates three new social technologies that organize infrastructures of complex innovati ... More

Our most pressing societal problems such as enhancing health care, developing alternate energy, revitalizing cities, and advancing the economy are complex innovation systems. Leveraging the enormous potential of sciences and technologies into better resolutions for these complex social and economic challenges requires a transformation in social technologies we use to tap into this potential. We can grapple with these complex innovation systems effectively only by taking advantage of emergence. This book articulates three new social technologies that organize infrastructures of complex innovation systems for taking advantage of emergence. The social technologies centre on abduction, or the logic of discovery, for figuring out solutions to complex problems. Abductive reasoning differs significantly from deductive confirmation and simple rationality. This book details three abductive learning routines that enable innovators to grab noisy and fragmented information, synthesize it into configurations that capture the inherent ambiguity, evaluate these configurations by exploring consequences and contingencies, and reframe to accumulate the learning. The second social technology divides the infrastructure into four distinct but entangled subsystems of interpersonal action: the project, knowledge system, strategic, and institutional subsystems. Each subsystem is a vast multi-organizational network that must address its distinct problem if the infrastructure overall is to productively innovate. The book shows how cycling through abductive learning routines overcomes problems in each subsystem that conventional approaches cannot deal with. The third social technology is a new way of organizing based on heedful interrelating and heterarchy, not hierarchy.