This session led by the Systems Innovation Network’s Governance Hub and hosted by Maarten Lens-FitzGerald, features Tatiana Fernandez, Head of Transformative Innovation at the Government of Catalonia, and Míriam Acebillo-Baqué, member of the TIPC team and researcher at INGENIO CSIC-UPV.
Tatiana discusses her team’s work applying a systems thinking approach and tools from the Transformative Innovation Policy Consortium (TIPC) to address complex societal challenges. The Catalan government’s initiative focuses on fostering ‘shared agendas’, which are place-based collaborations that bring together diverse stakeholders – local communities, government agencies, researchers, and businesses – to co-create a shared vision for a more sustainable future and develop innovative solutions to achieve it.
Together, they highlight how TIPC concepts and methodologies have been instrumental in guiding the Catalan government’s transformative innovation efforts.
This includes the use of systems mapping, a participatory process that helps stakeholders visualize complex systems, identify leverage points for intervention, and co-design solutions. The works also utilises the Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) framework to analyse the dynamics of change within socio-technical systems and guide their interventions towards destabilizing existing, unsustainable regimes and fostering the emergence of more desirable alternatives.
The emphasis on formative evaluation, an iterative learning process that focuses on understanding how change happens in complex systems, is another key takeaway. This approach allows the Catalan team to continuously adapt their strategies based on real-world feedback and insights, ensuring their interventions remain relevant and effective in driving transformative change. The video showcases examples of how these tools and approaches have been applied in real-world projects in Catalonia, demonstrating their effectiveness in fostering collaboration, innovation, and ultimately, systemic transformation.
