Graciela Nava Guerrero,
Rafael Silveira,
Image by Booyabazooka (2006). Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.
From our initial literature review, we defined what a Permanently Innovate socio-technical system would look like, as explained here.
In a few words, Texel is 100% self sufficient and Permanently Innovates when:
- Texel maintains the six elements of a system of innovation, including actors and networks, institutions and organizations and knowledge and dynamics.
- Texel permanently expands its networks of actors, including organizations and institutions that initiate, develop, import, modify, disseminate and implement innovations.
- Systems of innovation in Texel perform their six key funcitons: entrepreneurial activities, knowledge development, knowledge diffusion through networks, guidance of the search, market formation, resource mobilization and creation of legitimacy.
- Texel´s innovative dynamics changes socio-technical systems in such a way that new, relevant and proper technologies would be either accepted or would change the system’s regime.
- Texel is able to produce new rules and regulations to negotiate those changes.
- Its Permanently Innovate sub-system is based in common values of Texelaars and a common vision of the island.
The following paragraphs elaborate on the details that some of the different dimensions should include.
Informal institutions
Based on our desk-research about systems of innovation in Texel, we found that it would be convenient to include the following values, interactions and ideas in the new socio-technical sub-system.
Table 1. Values, interactions and some artifacts and ideas to Permanently Innovate
Dynamics of the sub-system
To understand better how the interactions described in the Table 1 would happen in Texel, we adapted the diagram presented in Section 1.2 according to our sub-system categories for the future of Texel (Figure 2). For example, the bottom-up involvement in the island’s management (mentioned in Table 1) can be seen in Figure 2 as the actors giving feedback to the Municipality and actively participating in governance processes.
In the Figure 2 we illustrate the interactions between all major actors in our Future vision for the Permanently Innovate sub-system Texel. These interactions are derived from the analysis described in Section 1.2 together with the initial conclusions presented in this Section.
We picture the Sustainable Initiatives as the engine of our sub-system, with a behaviour based on sharing knowledge and constant improvement. Along with other networks of actors, the former SDT used to be a major intermediary; helping the initiatives to develop and connecting them with the necessary actors. In addition, the Municipality is now open for feedback from the other actors, allowing constant improvement of its coordination of the island’s future. Besides that, the new system also considers a new role for the tourists. In addition to enjoying the island and helping the economy, tourists would bring external feedback and knowledge to the actors with whom they interact.
Figure 2. Graphical representation of the interaction between actors involved in innovation in our Future Vision for Texel.
Based on the idea of what the Permanently Innovate subsystem in Texel would look like, Section 1.4 discusses our problem statement, sustainability criteria, research question and research objective.ctive.
