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Orchestrating Global Solutions Networks: A Guide for Organizational Entrepreneurs

2014; The MIT Press; Volume: 9; Issue: 1-2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/inov_a_00209

1558-2485

Kenneth W. Abbott, Thomas Hale,

Innovation and Knowledge Management

From poverty to financial regulation, global health to climate change, national governments and international organizations are finding it increasingly difficult to address pressing transnational challenges.To help fill these governance gaps, a host of global solution networks (GSNs) are emerging, enabling companies, cities, civil society groups, individuals, and other actors to join traditional organizations in addressing global problems.We often think of GSNs as self-organizing, "bottom-up" arrangements.In fact, a significant number are products of orchestration, a strategy in which organizational entrepreneurs-including NGOs, business leaders, governments, and intergovernmental organizations (IGOs)-consciously act to initiate, support, and shape GSNs.Orchestration is a potentially powerful tool for entrepreneurs that seek to effect beneficial changes in behavior but lack the formal authority to mandate such change.It is also an underused tool; of the 223 GSNs we surveyed, we found that only 53 (fewer than a quarter) were at least in part a product of orchestration.Moreover, most of these involved just six "super-orchestrators," including the U.S. and UK governments, the United Nations Environment Programme, the World Bank, and WWF.The implication is that many more organizational entrepreneurs-including "traditional" actors like national governments and IGOs-can use orchestration as a strategy to tackle global problems.This memo introduces the strategy of orchestration and offers practitioners guidance on how to employ it.To be successful, an orchestrator must (1) be seen as legitimate by the organizations with which it aims to work; (2) occupy a central