In November, the UK hosts the delayed United Nations COP26 climate change summit. During the build-up, and over the COP itself, the Sussex Energy Group will be presenting highlights of its research in this seminar series that are relevant to the themes of these crucial global negotiations.

Find out how TIPC mobilises the power of innovation to address United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, and how a learning game can explain the complexities of change in complex socio-technical systems. Transformative Innovation Policy is a new framing for innovation policy that supports the race to net zero and towards a sustainability transition for the world.

Description

The Transformative Innovation Policy Consortium (TIPC) is a global collaboration between researchers, policymakers and STI funders across countries in the Global South and Global North with an ambition to implement Transformative Innovation Policy (TIP). TIP as a concept has a new rationale of realigning innovation policy with the social and environmental challenges facing the world (Schot and Steinmueller, 2018) through experimental and formative evaluation of policy.

TIPC has implemented several experimental policy engagements (EPEs) on COP26 related themes together with partners in diverse countries. EPEs are by definition “the diverse ways in which (STI) policy makers engage with processes of societal experimentation for sustainable transformation: initiating, supporting or mobilising, and evaluating such initiatives for informing decision-making, enabling processes of social learning, developing alternative pathways and enacting desirable futures” (Ghosh et al., 2021). EPEs in TIPC that are relevant to COP26 themes include some of the MOTION projects that TIPC is working with Climate-KIC on, such as the ‘System and sustainable Approach to virTuous interaction of Urban and Rural LaNdscapes’ (SATURN) project and ‘ACT on Nature-based Solutions’, as well as projects on waste management in Latin America and water management in the face of scarcity (Living Catchments project in South Africa). Over the past 4 years, TIPC has developed and implemented a novel methodology for monitoring, learning, and experimenting with the new generation of innovation policy in different contexts.

In this seminar, we will introduce a new framework of policy evaluation developed in TIPC called “transformative outcomes” (Ghosh et al., 2021). The framework comprises twelve outcomes across three macro-processes of transformative change and is aimed at reorienting the actions and initiatives of research councils, science and technology ministries, and innovation agencies through a more systemic and continuous governance approach building on sustainability transitions thinking. While implementing this methodology, we realised the difficulties of understanding and navigating the complexities of change in complex socio-technical systems.

To mitigate this problem, we have recently developed and tested a new learning game targeted at non-academic professionals. During this presentation, we will share experiences of developing and playtesting this game called “systemic change”. The transformative outcomes methodology and the game as a tool constitute core elements of a “resource pack” that is currently being developed within the central platform of TIPC called the Mobile Transformative Innovation Lab. Working in this lab for the coming year, we aim to consolidate and share all learnings from the past four years of TIPC co-creation work and help make innovation policies more transformative in the future.

Biographies

Bipashyee Ghosh is a Research Fellow at SPRU - Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex Business School, UK. She did her PhD from the same institute on urban sustainability transitions in the Global South. Her ongoing research is on Deep Transition Futures and Transformative Innovation Policy Consortium, where she is researching multi-system change, transformations in policies and investment. For more information, follow @bipashyee on Twitter.

Imogen Wade is a Research Fellow at SPRU - Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex Business School, UK. Her PhD from UCL was on innovation systems and governance in Russia. She currently works on the Transformative Innovation Policy Consortium (TIPC) and the Deep Transition Futures projects. She is working on a methodology for comparative analysis of the learning and capacity building across TIPC and helping with data and knowledge management strategy. For more information, follow @ImogenWade on Twitter.