Game changer in transformation processes
“Cooperative Innovation offers a paradigm shift for disruptive innovators and it creates resilient solutions for our world in the transformation process of the ongoing 21st century – towards a sustainable economic system and a smoothly running society.” (Franz Wenzel)
Cooperative Innovation is part of the basic research of the Megatred Institute by Franz Wenzel. It is a conceptual idea to emphasise both cooperation as dominant strategy in game theory and the fundamental understanding on its application in the transformation process towards a sustainable economic (and societal) system.
Overcoming pure disruption
Megatrends shape this world. They bring more and faster change than ever before in human history. Slipstreaming globalization, urbanization, digitization, networking, automation and other big trends, big companies and innovators of any size alike foster their strategic or financial goals with disruptive methods. Neither do they care for existing equilibria nor do they estimate the costs on the side of those being disrupted (cp. What disruption means in Real Life).
As systems and even whole societies are interlinked, any disruption might also bring systems or even societies to a new – maybe unintended or by a majority of its citizens unwanted – direction or let them (partly) collapse. Without special attentiveness business schools, innovation hubs and even political protagonists propagate disruptive innovation (cp. Social Market Economy and Disruptive Innovation) as key to a bright future.
Considering various potential scenarios (e.g. crucial driverless transport systems that may fail, automated production that completely exclude human workforce, financial markets which are open but at the same time out of any control) a paradigm shift towards more resilient solutions for our world and societies in transformation is urgently required.
A new cooperative mindset
Cooperative Innovation includes all actors and combines attentively the best parts of existing and new ideas into a new solution that does not produce losers. Where disruptive innovators enter the arena in a fighting mood and by force disrupt the existing work, trade or lifestyle equilibrium, cooperative innovators show their innovation to the relevant public and try to combine existing solutions and the new approach into one superior solution. Thus no fight is necessary, war costs are minimized or eliminated and the disruptive effect of the new idea might come to its full potential faster, cheaper and without leaving others behind respectively without risking the loss of a functioning and so far resilient system (cp. A theatre play on Uber and a Taxi driver).
Prosperity
Additionally there is sustainability beyond the profit line. Profit as such is not only direct financial return. It also is acceptance by the people (may it be the employees, the customers or the citizens of the country that offer and constantly de facto renew the companies’ license to operate), it is shared value and it is a promise to (socially) innovate towards a functioning future. Besides, in return non financial returns often produce cheaper cost structures, faster access to resources, trust and good social capital.
Cooperative Innovation
“My (economic) concept Cooperative Innovation is a further development of the innovation paradigm Disruptive Innovation in respectively and the Social Market Ecoomy. I think that Cooperative Innovation and the Social Market Economy can go hand in hand into a prosperitive future.” (Franz Wenzel)
