GreenATP: APPortunities to catalyze local to global positive tipping points through collaborative innovation networks

Abstract

AbstractHumanity's unceasing ingenuity is generating vast economic gain for billions of people with goods unavailable to even kings and queens throughout most of history. Unfortunately, this economic growth has triggered unprecedented security challenges of global and historical magnitude: more absolute poor than any time in human history, the sixth largest extinction spasm of life on earth, climate destabilization with mega‐catastrophic consequences, and multi‐trillion dollar wars over access to energy. These multiple, inextricably interwoven challenges have low probability of being solved if decision makers maintain the strong propensity to think and act as if life is linear, has no carrying capacity limits, uncertainty is controllable, the future free of surprises, planning is predictable and compartmentalized into silos, and Gaussian distributions are taken as the norm while fat‐tail futures are ignored. Although the future holds irreducible uncertainties, it is not fated. The emergence of Internet availability to one‐third of humanity and access by most of humanity within a decade has spawned the Web analogue of a ‘Cambrian explosion’ of speciation in knowledge applications. Among the most prodigious have been collaboration innovation networks (COINs) reflecting a diversity of ‘genome’ types, facilitating a myriad of collective intelligence crowd‐swarming phenomena (Malone T, Laubacher R, Dellarocas C. The Collective Intelligence Genome. MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring; 2010, Vol. 51). COINs are essential tools for accelerating and scaling transformational solutions (positive tipping points) to the wicked problems confronting humanity. Web COINs enable acceleration of multiple‐benefit innovations and solutions to these problems that permeate the nested clusters of linked nonlinear complex adaptive systems comprising the global biosphere and socioeconomy [Raford N. How to build a collective intelligence platform to crowdsource almost anything. Available at: http:news.noahraford.com. (Accessed November 30, 2011)]. The Web initiative, GreenATP, illustrates this opportunity.This article is categorized under: Energy and Climate > Economics and Policy