Towards strategic management of complex systemic innovation environments: Integrating foresight, assessment, system dynamic modelling and societal embedding into a coherent model

Technological, economic and political changes have also created an environment where economic, social and political changes are transmitted faster than ever. Globalization emphasizes intertwinement of diverse sub-systems (e.g. firms, public administration, third sector, and various administrative sectors) across local, regional, national, and transnational scales. These kinds of dynamics, among others, call for a more systemic innovation policy approach, a holistic way to understand and analyse the complex interaction in networked socio-technical systems. In addition, the developments put more emphasis on strategic leadership and management of innovation policy and related decisions in various organizations from public to private sector. In practice this necessitates new kinds of methods, which strengthen horizontal approaches and steering mechanisms, and which are adaptive and able to respond to the rapidly changing situations (cf. OECD 2005). While there are good attempts to create more comprehensive information generation and management tools for the use of strategic decision-making and management (e.g. Rotmans & Loorbach 2009), there is still a need for more systematic and integrative methods. In this paper, we describe one solution by suggesting a combination of foresight, impact assessment, system dynamic modelling and societal embedding for understanding and managing the complex socio-technical systems