Transforming Public-Private Ecosystems : Understanding and Enabling Innovation in Complex Systems

Public-private collaborations are central to the functioning and provisioning of most essential ecosystems. Ecosystems such as security, healthcare, education, and the environment face challenges of governance, diverse constituencies, numerous advocacy organizations, incompatible outcome metrics, and persistent media attention, to name a few. There is a wide range of public and private players involved in operating, sustaining, and investing in these ecosystems, including stakeholders from government, industry, academia, non-governmental organizations, and the general public. Fundamental change requires understanding a wide range of interests and accommodating change strategies accordingly. The challenges of transforming these ecosystems would easily qualify as “wicked problems”; social or cultural problems laced with incomplete or contradictory knowledge, large numbers of people and opinions, substantial economic burdens, and inextricable connections with other issues. Transforming Public-Private Ecosystems addresses these challenges for the four important ecosystems of national security, healthcare delivery, higher education, and energy and climate, and provides an integrated perspective for understanding and enabling change.