<p>Innovation is promoted as a means to address
global environmental challenges and achieve resilience in the UN Sustainable
Development Goals. Innovation allows for adaptation and transformation in
socio-ecological systems as part of the adaptive cycle. Within resilience
literature, there are myriad definitions of innovation and disagreement about how
to motivate diffusion of innovation, making implementation and the
sustainability of innovations difficult. Specifically, matching the correct
innovation to a given challenge and motivating the adoption of the innovation
remains a roadblock to using innovation to address global environmental change.
Here we show that there are explicit conflicts among definitions of innovation,
and that innovation in the field does not align with some of these definitions.
We found that the diverse definitions of innovation show a more complex view of
innovation than normative treatment in policy suggests. We also found that several
interacting motivations affect long-term participation in certain innovation
activities. We discovered that binary views of innovation as either incremental
or radical are generally supported in examples of innovation in the field,
although some of the most successful examples of innovation better aligned with
a continuum view of innovation associated with the adaptive cycle. Our results add to the warm-glow hypothesis
that for altruistic tasks, the degree of participation motivated by a warm-glow
feeling which can be enhanced by other motivations. Contrary to crowding out
theory, our results suggest that monetary incentives result in higher adoption
in Malawi where cost of contributing is high. The findings demonstrate the
complexity of innovation, the misalignment between policy and practice, and
ways in which adoption might be optimized. This research is a starting point to
inform discussion about pragmatic innovation typologies. Such a typology could
help operationalize the SDGs by framing the innovation dialogue between policy
and practice.</p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:purdue.edu/oai:figshare.com:article/8977469 |
| Date | 16 December 2020 |
| Creators | Landon G. Young (5930450) |
| Source Sets | Purdue University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis |
| Rights | CC BY 4.0 |
| Relation | https://figshare.com/articles/thesis/Innovation_as_an_Adaptive_Management_Strategy_in_Social-Ecological_Systems/8977469 |
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