The emergence and quick spread of the coronavirus in late 2019 has caught people off guard. It soon became a global pandemic as continuous mutation of the virus made it more contagious.
At the same time, the virus spread has created lingering uncertainties and chaos worldwide due to delays in public health measures or difficulties in making policy decisions. However, as the virus took its toll, people were also relentlessly looking for solutions and soon they realized the importance of synergy to manage the health crisis.
Scientists from various disciplines, medical workers, industrial players, government agencies, and political leaders broke the bureaucratic barriers and worked hand in hand to achieve one common goal: to heal the world. The collaboration resulted in the ability to produce COVID-19 vaccines in less than a year.
The partnership and innovation continued on a much larger scale when the vaccine was ready to be distributed. The distribution speed and scale of COVID-19 vaccines far surpassed any previous vaccines. By the end of 2022, around 70% of the population in most countries have received at least one dose of vaccine.
Another example of problem-solving at a larger scale is the Taobao Village program. It has successfully turned China’s impoverished villages into thriving entrepreneur hubs, with an average 25% increase in annual income over the past five years, even during the pandemic.
The Taobao program started in 2009 with three villages to 4,310 in 2019. Under this program, the country’s top entrepreneurs set up an example and shared their business knowledge with people at the bottom of the pyramid. The goal is to encourage these people to start their ventures and improve their lives. This effort received tremendous support from many parties.
The government has created policies to promote business inclusivity and provided training and public services for those who want to be entrepreneurs. Various industries, such as technology, finance, and logistics, are gradually enhancing their services, which allows Taobao villagers to test their products and come up with innovations that cannot be copied easily.
Both cases showcased the significance of collaboration in handling huge problems and making a big impact.
With a majority of the world continuing to face issues and crises, the progress made during the COVID-19 outbreak and the success story of the Taobao program can become lessons for us to learn, which bears a question: What can we take from both examples to create sustainable solutions for pressing problems?
Innovation Ecosystem Approach for better problem solvingIf we look at the key aspects of COVID-19 vaccination and Taobao’s story, it would be multi-sector collaboration, shared ownership and autonomy, and support for innovation. These are all components of the innovation ecosystem.
What is an innovation ecosystem?
The story of Taobao village displays a great example of a good ecosystem. The government’s full support for people at the bottom of the pyramid gives them access to build businesses, while the involvement of IT and logistics industries allows these people to grow their businesses. In return, the government can achieve inclusive economic growth, while industry players can increase their market size and revenue.
When combined with innovation, a good ecosystem will create a larger impact.
In Taobao villages, surviving businesses are those that invest their time to explore unique local resources and conduct simple experiments to create useful products for the market.
The same thing happened with the COVID-19 vaccine. Scientists from different fields worked together to tackle the global pandemic, allowing knowledge transfer and fusion that led to vaccine creation.
How does the innovation ecosystem differ from others?
The innovation ecosystem is not governed by policies. It is also based on common purposes and how players within the ecosystem collaborate to make sure that these objectives are met. While the business ecosystem creates innovations to capture its value, the innovation ecosystem focuses on creating value that can benefit members of the ecosystem.
In the case of the COVID-19 vaccine, scientists put aside their need for patents that enable them to get value from their innovations. Their sole focus was to roll out the vaccine as fast as they can in a bid to lower the fatality rate from the virus.
These scientists put all of their energies and knowledge and successfully created effective vaccines that benefit the world’s population.
Even though there is a common objective, having people with diverse backgrounds and skills in one ecosystem can create its challenges. Each person will have their own agenda and offer different levels of commitment. Therefore, it is essential to keep the balance between shared priority and individual needs.
To do so, each person in the ecosystem needs to feel secure and believes that their needs will also be taken care of.
Unfortunately, building a trusting relationship is a process and cannot be done in a blink of an eye, especially when people in the ecosystem can be each other’s competitors.
Different levels of involvement and commitment could also create trust issues because one can be perceived as less contributing than the other.
Top Four Collaborative Mindsets to Nurture Trust in Innovation Ecosystem: Lessons from Indonesia’s Changemaker StoriesWe conduct a study of 328 changemakers in Indonesia to understand how people can nurture collaborative mindsets.
These changemakers have created a social movement and influenced people to join them. This allows them to solve problems and creates meaningful impacts, such as helping poor elderly with their daily needs, developing technology to tackle environmental issues, or building schools in remote areas.
In the study, we asked changemakers to narrate their life stories from childhood to the present day. Some are solving problems that only a few people dare to solve, while others are working with very limited resources. These challenges made them realize the importance of partnerships if they want to make significant changes.
As it turns out, collaborations with other parties open new resources and skill sets that help them overcome challenges that are often bigger than what they can handle. As these changemakers continue to learn and grow, they feel a higher need to have support from others to boost their strengths or inspire them.
Working with people from different backgrounds and perspectives allows these changemakers to upgrade the innovation process. It also improves their communication skills, assertiveness, and empathy. Furthermore, inputs from collaborators help changemakers to have a better view of their strengths and weaknesses.
Other than external challenges, working in a non-governed ecosystem or community is not always smooth sailing. Sometimes, the partnership seems like giving more hassle in the ecosystem and causing conflicts.
Changemakers learn from these conflicts and seek solutions to make the collaboration works, instead of seeing these conflicts as a hindrance to making great impacts.
According to the study, there are four mindsets that have helped changemakers in having fruitful collaboration:
1. Mindset on self
Our study found self-efficacy is the greatest determinant of making a change in society. By having this mindset, changemakers believe that to contribute, whether it is big, small, or different from others, instead of asking themselves whether they can do it or not.
2. Mindset on capability
Changemakers believe that there is no limit to capabilities. To make a change, there is no such thing as a lack of skills, there is only the need to partner with other people with the right skill sets. Combining skills and expertise is a contributing factor in creating innovations.
“I always remind myself that all of the technological advancement that we experience right now is human-made. So, whenever I feel that I don’t have enough resources or it feels too much for me to keep up with the growing challenges in this world, I will say to myself that we can always find other experts to co-create more technologies to meet our needs in tackling those challenges as what people before me did. Human capabilities are limitless.” -AA, female, CEO of a water management company-
3. Mindset on others
With limited resources, changemakers do not see other people who work in the same field as competitors, but rather as opportunities to leverage their resources.
For them, collaboration is to inspire and could enhance the innovation process. These changemakers believe that they would not be able to make an impact on many lives without collaborating with their current partners.
4. Mindset on conflict.
The changemakers’ life narratives give us the impressions that they like challenges and enjoy the problem-solving process. They perceive challenges as encouragements to continuously experiment and discover new solutions.
For changemakers, conflict is just one type of challenge. Hence, they see conflicts as an opportunity to see and understand new perspectives.
These four mindsets may look like a handful, but it is important to note that these changemakers were not born with the mindsets.
The mindsets are the results of continuous collaboration to make a meaningful impact. Is it difficult? Yes, but it’s not impossible.
How about you? How much your impact making team “fits” the collaborative mindset so that they are ready to be part of Innovation ecosystem? (ism)