SPECIAL FEATURE
If societies, governments, businesses and individuals understand the strength of system innovations, we
can generate an ‘innovation
movement’ that brings together many actors who share the benefits and risks of change.
Professor Andreas Klasen, Director of the Institute for Trade and Innovation, Offenburg University
Keeping billions afloat To be truly game changing, therefore, we need to go beyond national institutions and even high-level international partnerships. The international community will need to come together and redraw the global playing field, while persuading billions of people to learn and play by new rules. To adapt, as humans do, to new physical environments and even, given the speed and scale of climate change, to a new social contract. Says Klasen: “We know what the primary sources of greenhouse gas emissions are in emerging economies, for example: transportation, electricity production and industrial processes. What has most potential in terms of impact is a stronger innovation ecosystem, integrating technologies and processes, business models and infrastructure, regulatory frameworks
methods. Put simply, co-governance drives interaction and alignment.” International cooperation, also known as “mission innovation”, has paid dividends in recent years for clean-energy research, development and demonstration (RD&D), says a new report led by researchers at the University of Cambridge in the UK. Between 2000 and 2018, clean energy RD&D funding shot up across major economies in Europe, Asia and the USA by an impressive 936 percent, 247 percent and 127 percent respectively. What is less encouraging, however, is the real-world impact on offer: “While we have seen the creation of a lot of new energy innovation agencies since 2000,” says co-author Esther Shears, “they experimented only marginally with designs that bridge lab to market and manage only a fraction of total energy RD&D funding.”
– but also culture and values. If societies, governments, businesses and individuals understand the strength of system innovations, we can generate an ‘innovation movement’ that brings together many actors who share the benefits and risks of change.” What do these big ideas and all the constructive “systems thinking” in reality mean to the billions of people on the crossroads of climate change and poverty? How can we empower what economists call the “Base of the Pyramid” (BoP), the poorest two-thirds of humanity – 4 billion people – and give them a stake in the environmental, economic and social changes to come? The answer is largely in their hands, says Klasen, so long as the
international community is able to stomach the risk and deliver the funding.
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