30: Transformative change and systems innovation – Dialogue between behavioural and innovation sciences (Carlos Montalvo Jeremy K. Hall, Jordi Mollas-Gallart, Holger Strassheim, Carolina Resende-Haddad)
This track aims to promote collaboration between scholars and policymakers working at the intersection of transformative change and policy-making. One community (“Behavioural Sciences for Policy”, BSP) uses behavioural sciences to analyse policy and design interventions targeting individuals. The other (“Innovation Policy”, STIP) uses heterodoxic and multidisciplinary frameworks from the humanities to influence the framework conditions and foster innovation in individuals and institutions. Both communities made significant progress to understand the factors driving either change at the individual or at the systemic level. However, a better understanding of cross-level processes and interactions is needed.
BSP: The role of behavioural sciences in understanding the slow pace of citizen involvement, decision-making, and institutional actions concerning grand societal challenges is widely acknowledged. However, there are several limitations that hinder progress. Three key gaps can be identified: 1) Contextual variables are often neglected, despite their substantial influence on behaviours (e.g., income, education level, location, knowledge, resources or gender). We lack a clear understanding of how social roles and people's understanding of their role (citizen, policymaker, entrepreneur) within a community or innovation ecosystem affect behaviour and decision making. 2) Research and intervention programs target individual behaviours in isolation, whereas transformative change is characterised by a set of interconnected behaviours. Yet, BSP has difficulty understanding, let alone measuring or modelling complex interactions with other behaviours as well as unintended consequences of interventions. 3) Studies focus either on individual or collective action, overlooking the interplay between them. Recently acknowledged the importance of an in-depth understanding of individual, values, behavioural drivers and motivations, contextual factors, and interactions between various actors (e.g., peers, businesses, institutions).
STIP: The field moved from focusing on growth and competitiveness to solving the societal challenges and understanding the role that innovation plays in this process. The transformative potential of innovation and its effect in organising human activity is beyond discussion. Recent advancements in technologies showcase transformative changes in individual behaviour, consumption patterns, and industrial and commercial organization. The challenge for innovation policy design lies in directing technical change as well as fostering the willingness of individuals and institution to engage. Existing frameworks applied to research and policy provide a high-level description of the system, encompassing institutions, regulations, industries, and technologies. However, they often lack the necessary depth to effect behavioural change (often called behavioural additionality) among actors within an innovation ecosystem. The field needs to address questions such as: What motivates citizens, institutional actors, and businesses to engage in transformative innovation and change? What are the critical behavioural levers at the individual and collective levels that best inform the design of interventions and policy instruments? In addition, the field at large has unsolved questions surrounding the (ex-ante) prediction as well as the (ex post) measurement of impact and behavioural additionality of interventions at the system level.
The track will include papers addressing the gaps outlined above. Novel contributions will serve as springboards to share experiences and support the dialogue.
Keywords: innovation policy, transformative change, behavioural additionality, systemic interactions, value driven policy