Facilitating Innovation for Complex Societal Challenges: Creating Communities and Innovation Ecosystems for SDG Goal of Forming Partnerships

This study applies a social transformation perspective and aims to provide a conceptual framework for different innovation-driven communities and platforms designed to answer complex problems. Based on the SDG goal # 17 (The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals) on the importance of creating partnership, we examine the structures, strategies, and processes designed by the Israel Innovation Institute (III) in the creation of communities and innovation ecosystems. Our research questions are what are the processes and strategies applied to create an ecosystem for an innovation community and to advance partnerships, and how do they evolve and develop. Based on data from interviews, participant observations, and document analysis, we analyzed the pre-conditions for establishing these communities and innovation ecosystems, the community managers’ main strategies, and the processes in which these ecosystems evolve and develop. We find that the III creates a bottom-up process based on three inter-related functions: the creating encounters or partnerships within the community, leading to a second level of collaboration based on bringing various actors, knowledge, and resources from institutions or large organizations outside the original community. These functions lead to further reconfiguring the system higher-order change by setting additional encounters with multinational actors, state actors, and more. This study has significant policy implications for facilitating innovation for complex societal challenges.