Part IV: Orchestrating Innovation in Ecosystems

This part reviews innovation leadership practices in those contexts where leaders and leadership teams are coordinating efforts across multiple units within organisations, and/or across different organisations that are collaborating for mutual gain. This sort of leadership has the extra challenge of bringing together people from different organisations, with different historical legacies and cultures, to explore the potential for shared benefit.

As noted in Chapter 1, many wicked problems are likely to be tackled at this level. Problem definitions may spring from many sources with little consensus as to problem origin and solution approach. Multiple stakeholders will be involved, and the quality of mutual influencing and communications processes is likely to be vital for progress. A key rationale for multiple actors working at the system level is that the scale of the challenge is beyond the capabilities of any single organisation. Hence, collaboration is required, even though benefit realisation is unlikely to occur in the short-term.