[This post is intended to follow my Reader Response Post 5: New York State Contexts]

Over the last five posts I’ve provided an overview of the evolving theory and practice related to socio-technical systems (STS), as well as actual and potential applications within the context of agrifood systems development and a social and solidarity economy (including opportunities in New York State). These findings suggest recent efforts to “build back better, from the bottom up and middle out” may require more than updated technology. To be successful, an STS approach promoting the co-design and democratic ownership and governance of the technological systems we are increasingly dependent on will be needed. This could help address fundamental flaws in our economic operating system which are destroying our planet and humanity through its extractive practices, while also being better aligned with (and harnessing the generative power of) our universal drive for self-determination.

In many ways these things come together most perceptibly and practically within what has been called “regional development ecosystems”, particularly within the context of my focus here, community and economic development. This represents perhaps the most fertile “Goldilocks Zone” for applying these ideas at a meaningful and manageable scale. Small enough to be able to engage with individuals and organizations on the ground in a direct and transparent way, while encompassing an array of stakeholders, resources, and niches, regions offer many opportunities to realize positive and potentially transformative “regime changing” socio-technical transitions. That includes the opportunity to apply insights related to the Multi-Level Perspective from STS theory as well as Multi-Level Selection theory from evolutionary science through facilitative approaches like Prosocial (all touched on in earlier posts).

There is also a considerable and growing body of relevant literature and practice related to “entrepreneurial ecosystems”, and “social innovation ecosystems” (supporting the development of social enterprises explicitly focused on providing some societal value). Within this body of work, which seems to have evolved largely independent of STS theory building, there is increasing recognition of the need for more than just business development support. That includes a need for infrastructural related capacities at a higher ecosystemic level (several resources in this Zotero collection refer to this as part of a needed “middle-out” strategy, with trusted "infomediaries" playing key roles).

In a sense, there appears to be what evolutionary biologists call parallel or “convergent evolution” in these field building efforts. A situation where traits and features evolve independently, in order to fill a similar need or niche (such as flight). Community and economic development practitioner Ed Morrison writes about this within the domain of business managers, regional policy makers, and university leaders. In “Three perspectives on regional economies: A convergence on ecosystems and platforms”, Morrison (2018) provides a systematic review of several related research streams within the regional economic development scholarly literature, directed toward these three different audiences. In it he suggests that these are beginning to converge on two key concepts: ecosystems and platforms, and that valuable insights and progress might be gained by developing a tighter integration across these streams.

Drawing on his research and several decades of successful work in the field, Morrison (2017) provides guidance for this process in his “Practitioner Guide to Innovating Networks, Clusters and Ecosystems”. It offers practical insights, tools and frameworks for developing entrepreneurial and innovation ecosystems. That includes explicit attention to the role platforms can play in supporting the development of them, and the developmental processes required to cultivate them and the networks and clusters they depend on. Relevant to my work with Cornell, this approach includes strategies for effectively integrating universities and other institutions within these ecosystems without provoking an “immune response”.

This resistance to change is also noted in the STS literature regarding socio-technical transitions. Walrave and his co-authors (2018) refer to this in their article “A multi-level perspective on innovation ecosystems for path-breaking innovation”. Characterized as “networks of co-creating actors” who collaboratively develop “path-breaking innovations”, those ecosystems “challenge the prevailing socio-technical regime in a domain (e.g., established rules, artifacts and habits) that tends to be resistant to change”, increasing the chances of the innovation successfully taking hold within that ecosystem.

Michael Schlaile and his coauthors (2020) bring many of these ideas together in their paper, Proposing a Cultural Evolutionary Perspective for Dedicated Innovation Systems: Bioeconomy Transitions and Beyond. In it they propose a more integrated theoretical framework for development, incorporating insights from research related to STS, MLP, MLS, and cultural scaffolding (e.g., Wimsatt and Griesemer, 2007; Caporael et al., 2014) within the context of innovation systems supporting a sustainable bioeconomy. [The bioeconomy is defined as one based on renewable biological resources and knowledge, as an alternative to one currently dependent on extraction and fossil fuels.] Pointing to a current lack of research in this area, the authors suggest that greater attention be paid to the “black box” of psychological, social, and cultural dimensions of innovation, and how they can facilitate or inhibit desirable changes. The field of cultural evolution is offered as a useful meta-framework for bringing these elements together in a coherent way, and for identifying where and how to intervene in the complex systems they help model. That includes recognizing “coevolutionary relations in nested systems of systems”, as well as the importance of “cultural niche construction” and cultural scaffolding in enabling desired innovations to emerge and take root. The Prosocial facilitation process is suggested as a way to facilitate and scale cooperation between various innovation system actors in an intentional way.

Closely related to the ecosystemic approaches mentioned in Post 4, there is also a growing body of literature focused on regional strategies for supporting a social and solidarity economy. The OECD (2020) explore these in their paper, “Regional Strategies for the Social Economy: Examples from France, Spain, Sweden and Poland”. While not specifically focused on the role of technology, the paper does touch on topics relevant to it. That includes looking at how local and regional development goals might be realized by linking those with social and solidarity economy approaches, a process STS and ICT might help facilitate. The paper provides several policy suggestions, including: identification of specific assets a locality might use to create advantages; place-based approaches adapting policies to local needs; and governance to reinforce bottom-up approaches, align stakeholders, build citizen ownership, and create mutual accountability.

Drawing on insights from two case studies in Spain (the Mondragon Cooperative made up of industrial SMEs, and the agricultural cooperative group Anecoop), Juan Ramon Gallego-Bono and Rafael Chaves-Avila (2020) “illustrate how social innovation is promoted and spread by cooperative clusters in order to develop regional change”. While not specifically focused on STS, the paper does focus on a particular topic and outcome related to my interest in promoting solidarity economy approaches within community and regional development, and something an STS approach could help scaffold. Using the “cooperative cluster model”, the paper explores the process by which social innovations like the Mondragon cooperatives and the larger federation they are a part of can lead to broader change and social innovation across a region. That includes not only more straightforward adaptation and adoption of cooperative approaches by similar enterprises within the same region, but “exaptation”, where social innovations are applied in entirely new contexts. STS supporting the conditions for communication, learning and exchange conducive to such processes might facilitate the spread of positive innovations across an entire territory.

Several papers and case studies related to regional development ecosystems in the U.S. were also identified. That includes several documenting work related to Oregon’s Rural Opportunity Initiative (ROI), “a strategy to unify and strengthen existing business development resources to build rural prosperity through capacity-building grants”. The Business Oregon web site (2021) provides a variety of resources intended to help rural entrepreneurs “navigate the unique barriers they often face…helping communities grow existing businesses and support entrepreneurial-minded individuals”. The ROI works to strengthen entrepreneurial ecosystems, “a set of factors that interact to create an environment that favors (or does not favor) development of entrepreneurs and small businesses”. Recognized components of those entrepreneurial ecosystems include: finance, business support, public policy, markets, human capital, infrastructure, R&D, and culture. Relevant to ST ecosystems, infrastructure includes physical, digital, and intellectual resources that support the “interconnected whole that determines the health of the ecosystem and its capacity to support entrepreneurs”.

Undertaking similar work when Oregon state funding was temporarily cut for ROI, the non-profit Rural Development Initiatives (RDI) has also shared some of the lessons they learned (Hause, Davis, & Hendrickson, 2021). They offer insights related to the challenges community support organizations and entrepreneurs faced during the COVID pandemic in terms of technological capacity and access, as well as those more broadly related to networks and networked approaches to community and regional development.

Literature relevant to the focus of my research here was also identified documenting processes at work in the Boston metropolitan area related to the Boston Ujima Project (BUP). In research conducted under the auspices of the MAPS-LED research project (Multidisciplinary Approach to Plan Smart Specialisation Strategies for Local Economic Development) funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program, Bevilacqua and Ou (2018) look at BUP as a case study for understanding how a “place-based and multi-stakeholder innovation ecosystem promotes economic democratization and helps to address socioeconomic inequality”.

Coming at this from a slightly different angle, Penn Loh and Julian Agyeman from the Tufts University Department of Urban & Environmental Policy & Planning (Loh & Agyeman, 2019) look at Boston’s growing “food solidarity economy”. They examine how this emerging, non-centrally coordinated movement is linking together a varied network of nonprofits, social enterprises, and cooperatives operating across all parts of the food system, including BUP. Again, while the role of technology is not specifically referred to in either paper, case studies like these do suggest goals and outcomes which might be achieved in part through a socio-technical systems development approach. That includes growing the scale and impact of the solidarity food economy movement through a networked approach, allowing independent initiatives operating across the local food system to work together towards what Loh and Agyeman describe as “greater effects on power relations, policies, and consciousness”.

In another OECD publication (2021), several issues associated with small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and the digital transformation of the economy are unpacked. Despite the opportunities new technologies offer in terms of improving performance and overcoming size-related limitations, SMEs face many challenges in adopting these. Because of their collectively large contributions in terms of job creation and support for inclusive and sustainable societies, the “digital gap” SMEs face is a serious policy concern. Allowed to continue, inequalities associated with this digital transformation could continue to grow. The report looks at issues related to digital security, online platforms, blockchain ecosystems, and artificial intelligence, identifying opportunities, risks, and barriers associated with those. It suggests concerns which should be addressed in future SME digital policy agendas.

This issue of capacity building related to the digital economy is also a focus of the RII Community Toolkit developed by the Center on Rural Innovation (2019). It outlines the process required for rural communities to be successful in developing their own digital economy ecosystems. The toolkit contains four tools geared toward helping communities develop and support digital and innovation-based jobs: Readiness Assessment, Asset Mapping, Strategy Template, and Action Plan. CORI was founded in 2017 to address the dramatic opportunity gap between rural and urban communities, with an emphasis on advancing economic prosperity through the creation of inclusive “digital economy ecosystems”. They partner with their sister organization, Rural Innovation Strategies, a taxable nonprofit corporation using data-driven strategies, geospatial tools, and digital economy expertise to advance rural equity and opportunity.

The Aspen Institute Community Strategies Group (CSG) has published a report (2019) looking at the role “Rural Innovation Hubs” can play as vital infrastructure in regional development ecosystems. Drawing on interviews from 43 rural development leaders across the U.S., the report looks at the facilitative role these hubs can play in promoting “positive, inclusive community and economic development action in rural places” through the efforts of rural and regional “intermediary organizations”. Intermediaries are defined as “place-based organizations that work to improve prosperity and well-being by harnessing local and outside resources to design and deliver services and products to people, firms and organizations in their region”. Relevant to my research, one of the roles such intermediaries can play is to help rural areas “harness data and technology in new, sophisticated ways”, reducing the disadvantages they have relative to urban areas.

In terms of food systems related regional development resources, there is growing recognition that local and regional food systems offer a range of potential social, environmental, and economic benefits. A 2017 report (Dumont, et al., 2017) published by the Federal Reserve System and USDA (with several Cornell faculty and staff members contributing) highlights mainstream recognition of this potential. It states, “development of regional food systems not only contributes direct economic benefits to the community, but can also open the door for improved access to healthy food and other positive outcomes that could result in improved community health and a more productive workforce.” A key element of success in this work are asset-based development strategies which help communities and organizations identify, build, leverage and retain multiple forms of health and wealth themselves, equitably. Relevant to the focus of my research and practice (and specific approaches like WealthWorks value chain coordination), that includes socio-technical systems supporting the wise management of intellectual, financial, natural, cultural, built, political, individual and social “community capitals”.

Informing efforts to develop STS supporting local and regional food systems, in their recent paper (Hollander, et al., 2020) several Land Grant institution researchers propose “an iterative process to improve informatics frameworks for the foodshed by engaging with regional stakeholders to identify important issues and information needs”. The goal would be to map out linkages ranging from local communities out to the global food system, helping identify inefficiencies and access issues, while allowing for the development of smarter software technologies to facilitate interconnections addressing those issues.

References

(Titles hyperlink to respective citation entry for this group library)

Aspen Institute Community Strategies Group (CSG). (2019). Rural Development Hubs: Strengthening America’s Rural Innovation Infrastructure. Aspen Institute. Retrieved from https://www.aspeninstitute.org/blog-posts/rural-development-hubs-report/

Bevilacqua, C., & Ou, Y. (2018). Place, relationships, and community-controlled capital: On ecosystem-based innovation towards an equitable competitive advantages distribution, the Boston Ujima project case. International Journal of Sustainable Development, 13(8), 1072-1089. Retrieved from http://www.witpress.com/doi/journals/SDP-V13-N8-1072-1089

Business Oregon. (2021, May 20). Business Oregon | Entrepreneurial Ecosystems. Retrieved from Business Oregon: https://www.oregon4biz.com/Innovate-&-Create/ROI/Ecosystems.php

Caporael, L. R., Griesemer, J. R., & Wimsatt, W. C. (Eds.). (2014). Developing scaffolds in evolution, culture, and cognition. The MIT Press. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/developing-scaffolds-evolution-culture-and-cognition

Center on Rural Innovation (CORI). (2019). The RII Community Toolkit. Center on Rural Innovation (CORI). Retrieved from https://ruralinnovation.us/resources/tools/the-rii-community-toolkit/

Dumont, A., Davis, D., Wascalus, J., Wilson, T. C., Barham, J. A., & Tropp, D. (2017). Harvesting opportunity : the power of regional food system investments to transform communities. St. Louis: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, & Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.). Retrieved from https://www.stlouisfed.org/community-development/publications/harvesting-opportunity

Gallego-Bono, J. R., & Chaves-Avila, R. (2020). How to boost clusters and regional change through cooperative social innovation. Economic Research-Ekonomska Istraživanja, 33(1), 3108–3124. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1080/1331677X.2019.1696694

Hause, A., Davis, N., & Hendrickson, F. (2021, March). Rural Entrepreneurship: Lessons Learned from Ecosystem Building in Oregon. Retrieved from Rural Development Initiatives: https://rdiinc.org/rural-entrepreneurship-lessons-learned/

Hollander, A. D., Hoy, C., Huber, P. R., Hyder, A., Lange, M. C., Latham, A., . . . Tomich, T. P. (2020). Toward Smart Foodsheds: Using Stakeholder Engagement to Improve Informatics Frameworks for Regional Food Systems. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 110(2). Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2019.1662764

Loh, P., & Agyeman, J. (2019). Urban food sharing and the emerging Boston food solidarity economy. Geoforum, 99, 213–222. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.08.017

Morrison, E. (2017, Dec 16). Practitioner Guide to Innovating Networks, Clusters and Ecosystems. Retrieved from Aagiles Srategy Lab: https://agilestrategylab.org/practitioner-guide-to-innovating-networks-clusters-and-ecosystems/

Morrison, E. (2018). Three perspectives on regional economies: A convergence on ecosystems and platforms. Australasian Journal of Regional Studies, The, 24(3), 367–398. Retrieved from https://search.informit.org/doi/abs/10.3316/INFORMIT.119089024127743

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). (2020). Regional Strategies for the Social Economy: Examples from France, Spain, Sweden and Poland. OECD. OECD. Retrieved from https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/industry-and-services/regional-strategies-for-the-social-economy_76995b39-en

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). (2021). The Digital Transformation of SMEs. OECD. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1787/bdb9256a-en

Schlaile, M. P., Kask, J., Brewer, J., Bogner, K., Urmetzer, S., & De Witt, A. (2020). Proposing a Cultural Evolutionary Perspective for Dedicated Innovation Systems: Bioeconomy Transitions and Beyond. Journal of Innovation Economics & Management, Prépublication(0), I108-26. https://doi.org/10.3917/jie.pr1.0108

Walrave, B., Talmar, M., Podoynitsyna, K. S., Romme, A. G., & Verbong, G. P. (2018). A multi-level perspective on innovation ecosystems for path-breaking innovation. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 136, 103–113. Retrieved from https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0040162517304997

Wimsatt, W. C., & Griesemer, J. R. (2007). Reproducing Entrenchments to Scaffold Culture: The Central Role of Development in Cultural Evolution. In R. Sansome & R. Brandon (Eds.), Integrating Evolution and Development: From Theory to Practice (pp. 228–323). MIT Press. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265356184_7_Reproducing_Entrenchments_to_Scaffold_Culture_The_Central_Role_of_Development_in_Cultural_Evolution