Meso Resilience

Our firm's interest in the meso space and its role in economic development is not new. This research theme is about our continued efforts to develop new instruments and concepts that help identify, improve, and strengthen organisations and programmes in the meso space.

Meso organisations are established to promote economic development and improve the competitiveness of a region by responding to a variety of permanent and temporary market, structural and performance failures at the micro level. While they result from targeted meso policies, their success also depends on other policy measures to be effective. While meso organisations can perhaps make it easier for firms to identify ways to upgrade their technology or knowledge, a whole range of other interconnected features of the overall economic system determine the investment climate and, thus, the framework conditions for upgrade efforts at the level of firms.

Contact Dr Shawn Cunningham

Contact Frank Wältring

For the 2020 Annual Reflection, we wrote an article highlighting the four areas that we believe must receive attention to improve the resilience of the meso space. This article draws on several commissions we have received since 2017 to work with our clients to enhance the visibility, responsiveness and relevance of the organisations at the meso level. This research is ongoing.

We are currently organising our praxis around these four themes:

1 - Strengthening the system awareness and dynamics

2 - Deepening of the capabilities in the system to respond to change

3 - Improving the design of programmes and functions to enable innovation

4 - Catalyse future orientation

For more information about these four areas, please look at our most recent article and the related case study. We will work on short publications focused on these four areas in the coming months.

From 2015 to 2019, we worked with several clients and collaborators to develop a Meso Organisational Development instrument. For now, we have put this development on hold and integrated our learning into areas 1, 2, and 3 of the four abovementioned areas. The Meso OD instrument that we developed can still be downloaded here. Read Article 4 in our Annual Reflection 2017 research output for more detail on the four dimensions covered by the framework.

If you are interested in following this theme or contributing to developing any of the instruments and concepts, please get in touch with us.

We are also searching for institutions or programmes that can host an experiment where your team will do the research under our guidance.