Tag Archives: mesopartner

Mesopartner Summer Academy 2017

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I just realised that I have not published a post on this year’s Mesopartner Summer Academy in Berlin. Luckily, there are still places open, so if you see this post and are interested to participate in the training, please do apply!

The Academy is a training event for advanced professionals in territorial economic development and related economic development approaches. This year’s focus will be on what we call ‘meso organisations’. The meso level is where the both public and private actors on the national, regional, and local level work together to create locational advantages and increase relative competitiveness. The idea of the need to support the emergence and capacity of a meso level, though not new, is still not very strongly integrated in current approaches to economic development.

Besides the focus on meso organisations, we will also bring in as many insights as possible from our recent research products on systemic change. Continue reading →

An alternative to a Theory of Change approach

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I have been blogging quite extensively about the Theory of Change (ToC) approach in recent months. My blog posts reflect a process that I have been going through as part of my different work engagements: adapt ToC approaches to be more sensitive to the complexities development programmes face in their day-to-day work.

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Different phases of Systemic Insight

In parallel, with my colleagues at Mesopartner we keep doing research on understanding complex realities and our human reaction to them based on cognitive science, understanding the process of economic change, making decisions under conditions of uncertainty, and managing highly resilient organisations. In these contexts, ToC has limited applicability and a number of drawbacks. Therefore, we have been working on an alternative approach to the ToC approach which we built from the ground up based on our growing understanding of how complex systems work and how involved actors can lead a process of exploration and change. The approach is called Systemic Insight. Continue reading →

Mesopartner Summer Academy 2016

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Mesopartner Summer Academy 2016 in Berlin

This week we have announced the Mesopartner Summer Academy 2016 on Territorial Economic Development. This year, the academy will have a special focus on green economic development in territories. The academy will take place from 4 to 6 July in Berlin, one of the most exciting capitals in Europe with a rich history of economic transition and development. I will be there an I hope to meet some of my readers as well. Continue reading →

Systemic Insight – a new offer for programmes and organisations facing complex challenges

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Systemic InsightSince I have become an associate with Mesopartner in 2012, I have engaged in intense discussions with the partners around how to translate insights from complexity sciences and other quite diverse fields of research such as cognitive sciences, behavioural economics or new institutional economy into better ways in which we can support our clients who face complex challenges. The results of these discussions is Systemic Insight, a platform, approach and product focusing on supporting economic development programmes.

Recently, we added a page with concrete service offerings for programmes and development organisations to Systemic Insight. They include capacity building on making better decisions under conditions of uncertainty, translating results of analysis into action when facing complex challenges, supporting programmes that are stuck, and building up monitoring and learning frameworks for adaptive programme management. This also includes the use of SenseMaker®, a an approach for doing narrative research combined with a piece of software that we have started using more and more frequently.

Shawn, my main co-conspirator around Systemic Insight, and I also wrote an article that was recently published in the IDS Bulletin. You can find a brief description of the content, the abstract, and a link to the article page on the Systemic Insight Blog. The title of the article is Explore, Scale Up, Move Out: Three Phases to Managing Change under Conditions of Uncertainty and the main message is that economic development is about introducing options into local economies, not bringing solutions from the outside.

In the near future, I will focus my (re-invigorated) blogging activity on Systemic Insight. I have done some really interesting work recently and I am keen of sharing some ideas and insights with our readers. Shawn and I also want to share some of the principles and heuristics that guide our work. So please head over to Systemic Insight and subscribe to the blog! I am looking forward to your comments!

Join me for the 10th Mesopartner Summer Academy on Systemic Change

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Mesopartner Summer AcademyAlso this year I will be training at the Mesopartner Summer Academy, which takes place in Berlin from July 7 to 11.

The focus of this year’s academy will again be on systemic change in economic development. We will unwrap systemic change in economic development. Complexity thinking has in the last couple of years become more and more the basis of our work. So this will guide also the inputs during the academy. We will introduce the Systemic Insight Approach (see http://systemic-insight.com) and some general considerations about change in systems. Then we will run two streams, one with a focus on territorial (sub-national) development, the other with a focus on industrial development (this e.g. includes things like Value Chain approach). On Thursday, there will be shorter sessions with a number of electives like supporting green development, bottom up policy development, competitiveness and innovation, complexity in economic development more in depth, etc.

I would be happy to see some of my readers at the Academy. There is an early bird discount for registrations up to 24 March!

More information on the 10th Mesopartner Summer Academy 2014.

Systemic Insight and complexity: looking forward

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This post was first posted on Mesopartner’s Systemic Insight page. 

This week, the five partners of Mesopartner and Marcus are meeting in South Africa for the annual partner meeting. The meeting is an important event for Mesopartner where knowledge and learning is exchanged, new ideas and theories are shared, the Summer Academy is planned, and many other strategic issues are discussed. Continue reading →

New Mesopartner working paper on complexity theory and development

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Screen Shot 2013-12-06 at 12.20.50For the last years I have had the privilege to take part of and contribute to Mesopartner’s journey into the field of complexity. We started to dismantle and question almost every aspect of our instruments, tools and theories. This journey has been very much in line with my own work, pondering how complexity theory can contribute to making economic development more effective and sustainable.

One of the results of this process is the Systemic Insight website, where we want to share our thoughts and invite our followers to contribute to the discussions we have (and where some of my blog posts are also cross-posted).

A new Mesopartner Working Paper now provides a theoretical grounding for the work we have done and will continue to do. Together with my co-author and friend Dr. Shawn Cunningham (who’s blog I highly recommend), we consider some definitions, ponder the implications and try to formulate some responses to some of the key challenges that systems and complexity theories confront us with in our field of bottom up economic development.

We see this paper as an input into a broader discussion with our close collaborators, our close clients, and the broader network that we form part of. I would like to ask you to send us your thoughts and add your comments to this and future posts.

Exploring narrative sensemaking

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I haven’t been posting for a while. The reason is that our first daughter was born in August and we are still overwhelmed with having a new person in our household. My work has been cut down to the minimum so we can cater to and at the same time hugely enjoy the new person in our lives.

Nevertheless, I have been doing some work. An interesting new avenue I am exploring is that of narrative sensemaking. Narrative inquiry has a long history and there are various branches to it. The branch I am exploring is based on the approach by Dave Snowden and his company Cognitive Edge, which attempts to collect metadata together with stories that can be analyzed statistically. This effectively adds a quantitative component to the otherwise purely qualitative nature of narrative inquiry.

As a first pilot we have added a narrative study to a larger thematic study on Regional Economic Development (RED). This thematic study is implemented by a consortium consisting of Mesopartner and SISTME for the Multilateral Investment Fund (MIF) of the Inter-American Development Bank. The goal of the narrative part of the study is to find factors that promote or hinder Local Economic Development initiatives to reach scale – either through effecting changes on policies or through a copying effect by other regions and actors.

Currently, we are collecting narratives from LED practitioners in Latin America. But we are also adding experiences from practitioners all around the world to get a richer picture and be able to compare the importance of the factors. We are using SurveyGizmo to collect the narratives. Although it does not allow for all the tricks as a specifically developed software like Cognitive Edge’s SenseMaker, we see it as a low-cost alternative to test the approach. We will know more about the suitability of the tool when we are done with the study. In any case we are eager to also use the more powerful SenseMaker Suite in upcoming projects and compare the functionality.

If you have made experiences in local and regional economic development that you would like to share, please fill out the questionnaire and share your story. You will have the chance to win a book voucher worth 75 USD. Here is the link to the three versions of the questionnaire we have: English, Spanish, Portuguese.