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Mesopartner Blog
At Mesopartner, we are passionate about exploring complexity and driving meaningful change in territorial development, innovation, and economic systems. This blog is a space where we share our insights, experiences, and reflections drawn from our work across the globe. Whether you're a development practitioner, policy-maker, researcher, or simply curious about how systems thinking can inform more sustainable and inclusive development, we invite you to join the conversation. Here, we unpack ideas, showcase tools and methodologies, and offer thought-provoking perspectives on the challenges and opportunities of working in complex environments.


The evolution of technologies, industries and regions
In the earlier research on technological evolution in the 1970-1995 period, attention was mainly paid to either a whole economy or a single sector or technological paradigm. It is broadly understood from this research that different industries and technologies evolve at different rates.

Dr Shawn Cunningham
3 days ago
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How institutions, technologies and companies co-evolve
This is the fourth post in this series about economic evolution. In this post, I will look at the co-evolution between companies and the broader institutional environment they form part of.

Dr Shawn Cunningham
3 days ago
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The modules that evolve
This is the third post in this series about economic evolution. In this post, I want to focus more on the modules that the evolutionary algorithm act upon that I mentioned in the previous post.

Dr Shawn Cunningham
3 days ago
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How technologies evolve
In my previous post , I introduced the general evolutionary algorithm of variety creation, selection and amplification. I intentionally...

Dr Shawn Cunningham
3 days ago
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Evolution in the economy
Economic evolution is often a topic in conversations with the teams I am coaching and the leaders I advise. It is a simple idea to explain, yet it allows for a much deeper exploration of why and how economies and organisations change. Even leaders without a background in economics or innovation can see the role they play in promoting innovation and economic development.

Dr Shawn Cunningham
3 days ago
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Improving the value proposition of the meso layer to enterprises
When working to improve the performance of any sector or value chain, we are often confronted with a range of meso organisations or programmes designed to support upgrading, skills development and better decision making in small businesses in the targeted sector.

Dr Shawn Cunningham
3 days ago
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The affordances provided by institutions
In October 2020, I participated in a week-long exploratory retreat hosted by Cognitive Edge. There were two different events in the same month, and I experienced them as one event where we explored amazing concepts around complexity, sense making, aesthetics, knowledge management and so on. During one of the many breakout groups of these events, I was confronted by the concept of affordances. I was introduced to the concept by Greg Spencer and was immediately intrigued by it.

Dr Shawn Cunningham
3 days ago
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Becoming better at tracking how technologies change over time
The subject of how technologies evolve over time have been receiving a lot of attention over the last 40 years. Actually, much of the...

Dr Shawn Cunningham
3 days ago
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Meso Institutions as enablers of Self-Discovery, Increasing Learning and resilience
In every economy there are organisations that emerge to address all kinds of market, structural and organisational failures. We call these organisations meso organisations – they perform meso functions aimed at improving the economic performance and prosperity of the micro-level. While some meso functions may be more concerned with creating a regulatory framework and others with education or technological services, in essence all meso functions are about disseminating knowled

Dr Shawn Cunningham
3 days ago
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Identifying the meso organisations that strengthen technological capability
This article is from the Mesopartner Annual Reflection 2019 (Cunningham, 2019). In this article, I explore how one could go about to discover the network of meso organisations in a country that helps the private and the public sector to strengthen technological capability.

Dr Shawn Cunningham
3 days ago
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Different kinds of technology dissemination
In many of the projects where I work, we face the challenge of gaining access to publicly funded resources that the private sector finds hard to reach. These technological resources could be in the form of scarce equipment, specialists or even in the form of codified or tacit knowledge. Often, the private sector is not even aware of the technological resources in their location or country.

Dr Shawn Cunningham
3 days ago
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Exploring the gaps between universities and industries
When working on technological change and the improvement of innovation systems, the topic of the different gaps between universities and...

Dr Shawn Cunningham
3 days ago
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How to kickstart innovation in my team?
This is the question that I receive most often from leaders. Where do I start with improving innovation in my organisation or department?

Dr Shawn Cunningham
3 days ago
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How to figure out how technology is changing
In everyday English, technology can refer to a gadget, artefact, know-how, or software application. In contrast to this colloquial understanding, Professor Brian Arthur[1] emphasises the importance of a broader understanding in which technology is seen as a means to harness natural phenomena and arrange processes to produce something or achieve a specific purpose.

Dr Shawn Cunningham
3 days ago
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Weaving entrepreneurial innovation ecosystems in South Africa
In the second half of 2024, Annelien and I were awarded a contract to mobilise, equip and support facilitators who weave together entrepreneurial innovation ecosystems in South Africa.

Dr Shawn Cunningham
5 days ago
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Enhancing Quality Infrastructure for Medical Technologies in the EU: Precision, Safety, and Innovation
By Ulrich Harmes-Liedtke, Ozan Aykurt and Folker Spitzenberger The European Union is at the forefront of medical innovation, supported by...

Dr. Ulrich Harmes-Liedtke
Dec 13, 2024
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Form follows function
One of the oldest explicit principles that have shaped my thinking is “form follows function”. When I joined the GTZ (predecessor to GIZ) in 2003, this was one of the first principles that my manager (Mrs Gabriele Trah) often repeated when we received proposals from our counterparts, or when we were designing interventions in a particular context.

Dr Shawn Cunningham
Sep 23, 2024
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Strategy means saying “No!”
At the start of this year, I want to share some advice I received from Prof David Maister many years ago. David Maister was an early podcaster in the 2000s, and I loved listening to his podcast.

Dr Shawn Cunningham
Jan 13, 2023
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