White Spaces Innovation in Sweden - Innovation policy for ... - Vinnova

WHITE SPACES INNOVATION IN SWEDENThe first framework captures the idea that people have diverse perspectives. Informallyspeaking, perspectives represent solutions to a problem. When we say that peoplehave diverse perspectives, we mean that they see or envision the set of possibilitiesdifferently. Perspectives embed knowledge: what we know is a function of how werepresent things. Perspectives provide one framework for how people see the worlddifferently. A second framework, interpretations, highlights the different categoriespeople use to classify events, outcomes, and situations according to Page. For example,one financial analyst might categorize companies by their equity value, while anothermight categorize them by industry. One voter might categorize politicians after whatparty they represent. Another might categorize them based on which part of the countrythey represent. Informally speaking, interpretations lump things together. A thirdframework captures the different tools people use to solve problems. These are calledheuristics. These can range in sophistication from simple rules of thumb to sophisticatedanalytic techniques. Heuristics must be applied with respect to a particular representationof a problem, a perspective, so Page often speaks of perspective/heuristic pairs.Heuristics also play an important role in Martin´s Knowledge Funnel. Because peopleoften apply heuristics in combination, a person who knows two heuristics often knowsthree - the third being the combination of the first two. Often these combined heuristicsprove far more powerful than the individual heuristics that form them. The fourthframework for capturing cognitive diversity, predictive models, describes casual relationshipsbetween objects or events. Predictive models serve as a shorthand to makesense of the world. The combination of perspectives, interpretations, heuristics, andpredictive models, create cognitive toolboxes that are helpful in dealing with the tradeoffsthat Ashby point to. It should also be noted that predictions in a complexity settingrefers to predictions about system wide patterns whereas detailed predictions of behaviourare not possible.ConstraintsConstraints play a role in complex adaptive system since they are often perceived asnested hierarchies. One of the most debated issues in the literature is whether causationin these systems is about bottom-up self organization beyond control from outside andfrom above. Emergence is a concept that follows from self-organisation and interactionbetween parts of system. In some explanations of emergence it is interpreted as animpossibility to predict the outcome(s) of interaction. Of course this is at odds with ideaof policy making as purposeful intervention coupled with a presumption of a causal linkbetween activities and outcomes (predictability). From a physicist‟s perspective anythingbut upward causation is impossible because top-down causation would mean thata system is overdetermined. Other researchers take their starting point in the fact thatcomplex adaptive systems are nested self-organising networks of agents. This meansthat they are hierarchic and that especially in social systems with human to human interactionthere is also a possibility of social or downward causation. The stance taken to27