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When complex social-ecological systems collapse and transform, the possible outcomes of this transformation are not set in stone. This paper aims to explore the role of social imagination in determining possible futures for a reformed system. The authors use a historical study of the Luddite response to the Industrial Revolution centred in the UK in the early-19th century to explore the concepts of path dependency, agency and the distributional impacts of systems change.

In this historical study, the authors used the Luddites’ own words and those of their supporters, captured in archival sources (n = 43 unique Luddite statements), to develop hypotheses around the effects on political, social and judicial consequences of a significant systems transformation. The authors then scaffolded these statements using the heuristics of panarchy and basins of attraction to conceptualize this contentious moment of British history.

Rather than a strict cautionary tale, the Luddites’ story illustrates the importance of environmental fit and selection pressures as the skilled workers sought to push the English system to a different basin of attraction. It warns us about the difficulty of a just transition in contentious economic and political conditions.

The Luddites’ story is a cautionary tale for those interested in a just transition, or bottom-up systems transformation generally as the deep basins of attraction that prefer either the status quo or alternate, elite-favouring arrangements can be challenging to shift independent of shocks. While backward looking, the authors intend these discussions to contribute to current debates on the role(s) of social innovation in social and economic policy within increasingly charged or polarized political contexts.

Social innovation itself is often predicated on the need for just transitions of complex adaptive systems (Westley et al., 2013), and the Luddite movement offers us the opportunity to study the distribution effects of a transformative systems change – the Industrial Revolution – and explore two fundamental questions that underpin much social innovation scholarship: how do we build a just future in the face of complexity and what are likely forms those conversations could take, based on historical examples?

The purpose of this paper is to explore multiple Canadian educators' experiences with the Map the System (MTS) competition, designed to foster and grow systems thinking capacity among students exploring complex questions. The challenge has been an opportunity for social innovation programs (from the nascent to the established) across Canadian post-secondaries to engage both with their own communities and with social innovators internationally, connecting social innovation spaces as part of their third mission. Across the organizations, students valued the interdisciplinary and systems thinking qualities, and organizations benefited from the external competition, there remain questions about organizational engagement in social innovation as a deeply transformative process internally.

All Canadian post-secondary institutions who participated in the 2020 MTS competition (17) were invited to a digital roundtable to discuss their experiences. Ten were able to participate, representing a range of post-secondaries (including large research institutions, undergraduate-only universities and colleges). To facilitate discussion, participants met to discuss format and topics; for the roundtable itself, participant educators used a google form to capture their experiences. These were summarized, anonymized and redistributed for validation and clarification. To reflect this collaborative approach, all participant educators are listed as authors on this paper, alphabetically after the organizing authors.

For students participating in MTS, they have built both their interdisciplinary and systems thinking skills, as well as their commitment to achieving meaningful change in their community. But MTS arrived in fertile environments and acted as an accelerant, driving attention, validation and connection. Yet while this might align with post-secondary education’s third mission, educators expressed concerns about sustainability, internal commitment to change and navigating tensions between a challenge approach and collaborative work, and internal work and national competition limitations. This complicates the simple insertion of MTS in a post-secondary’s social innovation-related third mission.

This study was limited to Canadian post-secondaries participating in MTS, and therefore are not representative of either post-secondaries in Canada, or all the MTS participants although Canada is well represented in the challenge itself. Additionally, while the authors believe their approach to treat all participants as authors, and ensured multiple feedback opportunities in private and collectively, this is a deliberate and potentially controversial move away from a traditional study.

More than half of Canadian universities (a subgroup of post-secondaries) had at least one social innovation initiative, but questions have been raised about whether these initiatives are being evaluated internally, or are triggering the kinds of transformative internal work that might be an outcome. Understanding the impact of MTS one example of a social innovation-related initiative can help advance the broader conversation about the place (s) for social innovation in the post-secondary landscape – and where there is still significant work to be done.

As Canada has only participated in MTS for four years, this is the first inter-institution consideration of its related opportunities and obstacles as a vehicle for transformational social innovation. As well, educators talking openly and frankly to educators reinforces the collaborative quality of social innovation across the post-secondary landscape.

Reconciliation between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian plurality has stalled. While the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) Calls to Action could be a focusing event, creating a window of opportunity for transformative social innovations; we see coalescing of interest, social capital and investment in decolonization and indigenization in the proliferation of professorships, programs, installations and statements. However, Blackfoot (Siksika) Elder Roy Bear Chief raised significant concerns that Indigenous knowledge, experiences and people are not yet seen as relevant and useful in higher education; such marginalization must be addressed at a systems level for authentic reconciliation at any colonial university. The purpose of this paper was to explore this dual goal of exploring barriers to and opportunities for Indigenous knowledges and knowledge holders to be valued as relevant and useful in the Canadian academy, using a complexity- and systems-informed lens.

Local Indigenous Elders provided guidance to reflect study purpose and target audience of academics, with an approach that respectfully weaved Westernized research methods and co-learning through indigenous knowledge mobilization strategies. This analysis extends results from a qualitative grounded theory study to explain social processes of professors and administrative leadership in a Canadian mid-sized university regarding barriers and facilitators of implementing TRC Calls to Action. This further interpretation of applied systems and panarchy heuristics broadens understanding to how such micro-social processes are positioned and influence larger scale institutional change.

This paper discusses how the social process of dominionization intentionally minimizes meaningful system disruption by othering indigenous knowledge and knowledge holders; this form of system-reinforcing boundary work contributes to rigidity and inhibits potentially transformative innovations from scaling beyond individual niches and moments in time. Elders’ consultation throughout the research process, including co-learning the meaning of findings, led to the gifting of traditional teachings and emerging systems and multi-scale framework on the relevance of indigenous knowledges and peoples in higher education.

This study was performed in one faculty of one Canadian institution; an important and potentially widely-present social process was identified. Further research is needed for greater generalizability. Conditions that led to this study are increasingly common across Canada, where at least one third of higher education organizations have explicit indigenization strategies and internationally where the rights and self-determination of indigenous peoples are growing.

Insights from this study can inform conversations about social innovation in institutional settings, and the current systems’ resistance to change, particularly when exploring place-based solutions to national/international questions. These initiatives have yet to transform institutions, and while transformation is rarely rapid (Moore et al., 2018), for these potential innovations to grow, they need to be sustainable beyond a brief window of opportunity. Scaling up or deep within the academy seems to remain stubbornly elusive despite attention to the TRC.

This study contributes to a growing literature that explores the possibilities and opportunities between Indigenous epistemologies and social innovation study and practice (McGowan, 2019; Peredo, McLean and Tremblay, 2019; Conrad, 2015), as well as scholarship around Indigenization and decolonization in Canada and internationally.

The Aakash tablet was developed as a social innovation (SI) to transform India’s higher education sector. This paper aims to explain the failure of the Aakash tablet beyond the typical explanations of deficiencies in the device’s technical capabilities. This paper argues that an SI lens provides a stronger explanation for its failure than the standard analyses built primarily on the technological viability of the device.

The Aakash project ran from 2010 to 2015. During this period, a number of government and policy reports as well as mainstream media articles were published on the device. Since 2015, a number of academic articles have been published on the Aakash emphasizing its failure as a technological solution. The authors draw on these sources to frame an understanding of the Aakash’s failure informed by SI theory.

Through a complexity-informed analysis, the authors show that the failure of the Aakash stemmed from flawed assumptions and a failure of the initiative to engage with both the particular and constantly changing features of the broader landscape of needs and opportunities.

This study draws attention to failure as a legitimate aspect of the study of SI. In presenting a “counter-case” to the usual success stories, it shows that the SI lens can also explain why an SI does not take off. It thereby adds to the literature on SI and complexity theory through an exploration of the complex interactions among public policy goals, technological advancements and entrepreneurship.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how a complexity informed understanding of Indigenous–settler relationships helps people to better understand Indigenous social innovation. To do this, this paper uses the attractor concept from complexity thinking to explore both the history and possible futures of Indigenous Maori social innovation as shaped by Te Tiriti o Waitangi/Treaty of Waitangi.

This paper frames Te Tiriti as a structural attractor for social innovation in Aotearoa-New Zealand and explores the dynamics at play in the social and economic activities related to Te Tiriti and the ongoing settlement process in Aotearoa-New Zealand. This paper outlines this as an illustrative case study detailing the relevant contextual spaces and dynamics that interact and the emergence of social innovation.

This paper suggests that the convergent, divergent and unifying dynamics present in a structural attractor provide a useful framework for building ongoing engagement between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people whereby Indigenous worldviews are given space to be articulated and valued.

In spite of the increase in research into social innovation, including in Indigenous contexts, the “context” of “postcolonial” context remains under-theorised and people’s understanding of the power dynamics at play here limits the understanding of how the mechanisms of Indigenous–settler partnerships structure social innovation and its impact.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the applicability of the complexity-based temporary innovation system (TIS) framework to social innovation and examine the extent to which “nature-based solution” (NBS) projects may be understood through a TIS lens. It is proposed that TIS provides a framework to facilitate multi-actor engagement in social innovation responses to the complexity of wicked problems? The goal is to explore if TIS provides a useful framework for understanding the evolution of social innovation projects and enabling more consciously designed and facilitated social innovation with the potential for large-scale, long-term impact.

The research uses a case study methodology in which 10 NBS projects in 3 European cities are examined and compared to the expected features of a TIS as proposed by anonymised for the review process (2018; 2019)

Of the 10 NBS projects, only 3 were “TIS-like”, each of which was targeting wicked problems in the city/community. As only one of the remaining 7 projects was aimed at a wicked problem, the authors concluded that the TIS framework may be best suited to those social innovations that address one or more wicked problems and that NBS projects may not display this feature.

The authors conclude with a reflection on theoretical insights arising from applying the TIS framework to NBS in particular, and social innovation generally – and proposes the next steps in developing the TIS framework in relation to social innovation.

This paper applies a new complexity framework to empirical data that have not been examined previously. This analysis contributes to the development of a new framework for designing and analysing complex social innovation initiatives and challenges existing theories presenting NBSs as addressing complex “wicked” problems.