Category: Thinking out loud

Humor: A Sketch about being an expert

I found this link to a sketch about the pain of being the only Engineer in a Business Meeting. I think the less I say before you see it the better. It is misleading to call this humor, because it is actually quite sad….

The video was posted by the Laughing Squid website, a site dedicated to featuring compelling art, culture and technology. The description of the video is as follows “The pain of being the only engineer in a business meeting is perfectly illustrated in the comedy sketch, “The Expert.” The sketch was written and directed by Lauris Beinerts and is based on the (Russian language) short story, “The Meeting,” by Alexey Berezin“.

 

I frequently feel like the “expert” in this sketch when I have to explain that keeping competitors out of a country by raising tariffs does not really make a domestic industry more competitive or innovative. Or that import substitution does not lead to local innovation. Or that innovation is not simply the commercialization of very clever research and development, but that innovation is something that should happen all the time.

Lets have some fun. Without mentioning names of people and organizations, when did you feel like the expert in this clip?

 

 

Best case examples and benchmarking have something in common – neither is good practice

Every time I conduct training on value chain diagnosis, innovation system promotion, or Local Economic Development, I get asked the to explain important principles or ideas with examples. The question usually posed is “can you give us more examples?”. Or even worse, “this is too much theory, please give us a clue how we can use this information in practice. Give us the best practice”. The hope is that there is a magic formula, silver bullet, case study or a high standard (benchmark) that can be followed that will guarantee us some success without risking too much. Within Mesopartner, we have agreed as trainers to be very selective with our case examples, as they typically narrow down the options our trainees should go an investigate themselves. We promote that people conduct a diagnosis or analysis of their environment, and then develop some strategic options, assess their options – and then make a decision and start with their action. If they made the wrong decision, then they should detect this as soon as possible in order to make corrective action. There are no shortcuts!

The same logic goes for benchmarking. Tim Kastelle recently published an excellent blog post on benchmarking and the myth that knowing how we compare with others will allow us to improve our own performance. This post is a must read. I love the title “You can’t benchmark your way to greatness“. From a complexity perspective I must add that the context wherein you have to define your own strategy is unique, and therefore we know that blueprints from elsewhere cannot work. Somehow everybody knows this, yet everyone wants to hear how others dealt with their situation. This is a circular logic that just doesn’t make sense.

But I must add that in the early days of benchmarking there was a more explicit understanding that you benchmarked yourself with companies that were completely different from your own. So automotive manufacturers benchmarked certain processes (like procurement of components) with photocopier companies. This was then an opportunity to learn and benefit from the different contexts that the respective firms were in. The idea was not to copy the process, but to learn how others used unique factors in their environment to address a specific issue. This is still the important for innovation, as learning from other contexts can provide important ideas on how to try something different. Nowadays, customers asks me to assist with benchmarking because they want to know what similar entities are doing better in order to replicate or copy the processes themselves. The main assumption is that if we do the same things as them then we will get similar results.

So coming back to examples. In my training I like to tell stories of examples, but I try to avoid describing “the method” too much. I rather try to explain the logic, the key principles, or the choices the decision makers in “the example” had to make based on their assessment of their options. I do believe we can learn from other contexts, but I believe the real value is sometimes to recognize that “the example” had figured out what choices they had to make. This is often what my learners are hoping to avoid. It is instinctive to copy the decisions the “best case examples” have made, and not to copy the fact that the example DEVELOPED OPTIONS AND MADE A DECISION, or sometimes they skipped the options part and they just took some specific action (innovation by accident).

To connect this back to benchmarking. The problem with benchmarking with competitors or other locations, is that their current performance is in fact informed by strategic decisions made some time ago. So if we chase the numbers in a benchmark, we are essentially chasing shadows, the competitor is already today making decisions that will result in performance indicators and processes that we will have to chase in 3 years when we catch up with their current numbers (which by then is old news for them). By then, the competitor have already adapted to their new context, while we are still struggling to fully integrate this new learning into our activities.

In conclusion, benchmarking and best case examples (or good practice as it is often softened down to) are not good practice in development. We cannot copy the blueprint, the practice or the approach of someone else. Firstly, context matters. As complexity in developing countries increase, so the importance of basing decisions on the local context increases. Secondly, the thinking behind the options and the decisions made matters even more than the outcome or the visible practice that can be identified during benchmarking or in a case example.

Update from the field

I wondered if I should name this post “from the airport lounge” but then I realized that I still travel much less than my business partners and some friends.

Seeing that so many of you ask me where I am I thought I will give a quick update.

Since my previoSplit Team Smallus post I have traveled to Split in Croatia to conduct an LED training for a group of local government officials from Bosnia. This was a great event because I had the opportunity to conduct the training with my business partners Frank Waeltring and Christian Schoen. This event was arranged for and funded by GIZ Bosnia and took place during the first week of September.

During this event it again struck me how no matter where we work with Local Economic Development, the main principles and challenges remain the same. The people, the language and also the priorities might be different, but the issues that we are always confronted by is a breakdown in trust between business and local government, fragmentation and confusion between local and national stakeholders, and the tension between bottom up and top down priorities and intervention means.

 

 

Immediately after Croatia I traveled to India to assist GIZ India to assist with designing a Private Sector Development Programme. The mission included capacity building of local experts, consultants and policy makers on innovation systems and how this perspective can be used to strengthen cluster, value chain and regional development programmes. I traveled with the GIZ team to Bangalore and Aurangabad to assess the readiness of different clusters to benefit from an innovation systems perspective.

In Delhi, my hotel room overlooked the famous Jantra Mantar astronomy instrument. It is anJantra Mantra heritage site that dates from 1724 that was one of the great astronomy observation posts of the time. I spent a whole Saturday morning looking at the details of this site. I also spent half a day on the Hop on Hop Off Bus in India.

I am looking forward to traveling back to India shortly for an extension on this assignment.

Thinking out loud: Is aid systematically unsystemic?

Originally published on 26 August 2013, edited and republished on 23 July 2019

I am taking a risk with this post, but I am sure my regular readers will bear with me as I think out loud. I have been fortunate in the past few months to have been able to focus my praxis almost completely on the topic of complexity and systems thinking in development, with a particular emphasis on innovation systems and the technological evolution of industries and regions. Shifting from advocating for a different approach to actually assisting with the shift has been a really exciting venture.

Disclaimer: These are my own opinions and do not reflect Mesopartner’s views. 

Systems and complexity thinking is now central to Mesopartner’s,  work (see our Systemic-Insight theme page). Not surprisingly, my main customers for working on systems and complexity are not those involved with development programmes per se, but meso level institutions tasked with supporting industries and sub-sectors to innovate, grow, compete and increase employment. It is no secret to most of you that I am very disillusioned with aid and development cooperation at the moment.

When you dive into the literature on complex adaptive systems and how they tend to function naturally, you cannot help but wonder whether aid and development cooperation is in a very systematic way trying to fight the very things that make economic systems so amazing. There are several universal phenomena about complex systems that seem to be ignored (I will highlight just a few that I found personally the most challenging to deal with in my work):

  • In complex systems, resources are allocated (or taken up) by those best able to make sense of the situation, using a combination of knowledge, resources and past experience. Marcus Jenal reminded me that people also exercise power and use their influence to take up these resources. It is a reinforcing loop referred to by systems thinkers such as Donnella Meadows as “strength to the strong”. It is even mentioned in the Bible and in other spiritual and philosophical texts. This presents us with the first dilemma as we can often sense that the way resources are distributed is not fair or just, and that many agents in the system will resist any attempt at redistribution.
  • Even when systems become unstable, they do tend to find a kind of equilibrium range. This means that systems will by their very nature resist our interventions as they strive towards some natural range.
  • When a system remains in a suboptimal state (in our judgement it is not delivering what we think it should deliver), we can almost be certain that somebody somewhere is using their power or influence to keep the system in a suboptimal state to extract rents from the situation. It is unnatural for systems to remain “broken” over an extended period without someone influential in the system benefitting from it.
  • Related to the previous point, the ability of an external agent to assess whether a system is broken is debatable and not questioned often enough. Even if the actors in the system believe it is broken, the system might just be behaving in a very natural way. Examples can be found in finance (who wants to lend money to potential losers when they can guarantee returns rather by lending to potential winners) or in agriculture (brokers overcome scale and uncertainty by aggregating volumes, and in return for their risk they earn good profits). There is a second dimension to this: if we ask the actors in the system what is bothering them, they will in most cases shift the blame for their decision or indecision somewhere else.
  • What is good for the system is not always good for the agents in the system and the other way around. An example is that strategies to promote exports or employment growth might actually have a negative effect on many small enterprises while having a positive effect on medium and large-sized enterprises. Or strengthening smaller enterprises might have a negative effect on the current account (through increased imports) while at the same increasing jobs in the service sector.
  • One of the weakest points of influence in a system is the actor, while one of the strongest leverage points is the purpose (often not articulated formally) and the rules (social institutions) of the system. Although it is much harder to change, the purpose of the system is the most important leverage point, followed by rules and the nature and frequency of interrelations. Yet most development programmes target particular actors, ignoring the implicit or unexpressed meta-purpose of the system. Furthermore, most measurement systems measure outputs at the level of the actor, instead of monitoring behaviour in the system. Behaviour (informed by social rules) is a better (yet harder to quantify) measure as it tells us something about the purpose, the meta culture and actors’ attitude towards his or her own health and the health of the systems. This is also a characteristic that I find personally challenging, as it takes time to change the purpose and the rules of the system. In many cases, people simply cannot even explain the purpose of their systems or the rules they follow, which are instinctively based on their values. Changing the purpose of a system requires people to change their priorities, their values, the way to judge success (or failure) and the way they perceive their role in a system or society.
  • There is a relationship between the actors and their artifacts (equipment, assets, machines, tools, etc,). Old, broken or outdated equipment is a symptom of old, broken and outdated business models implemented or executed by the actors. Somehow this is made possible by both the social context and the social as well as the economic technologies. Giving an actor a new artifact (equipment) does not necessarily change the system in the long term, as the actor is still the same. I have often witnessed how an old factory with outdated equipment but that is managed properly can outperform a modern factory run by incompetent management (management itself is an economic and social technology). Providing incentives for an existing business to buy new equipment is to address a symptom and not a cause of sustained underperformance. But an existing actor with a new attitude, better information or different behaviour is able to use existing artifacts more effectively. In the real world, this means that upgrading the equipment in a business is the wrong place to start. Rather promote new entrepreneurs or people who can better use the existing equipment. Physical technologies co-evolve with economic and social technologies; we are not dealing with an equipment problem only.

How do we get development programmes to embrace some of the strengths of complex systems? For example:

  • In complex systems, agents make decisions in a decentralised way. They make these decisions based on their perceptions of their environment and their perceptions of alternative futures, based on the information at their disposal. Thus flooding the system with valid information and promoting the view of how new knowledge or technologies can increase returns is much more valuable than physically trying to fix the actor. Education, technology demonstration and supporting experimentation are ways to provide entrepreneurs with better information to support decision making. It is often very difficult in developing countries to find this type of information which is needed for decision making support by entrepreneurs or firms.
  • A complex system exists of agents(or actors)and their artifacts, the interrelations between the agents and their common (system) purpose. Often in development, we describe only the actors, while ignoring the fact that a system has other elements that are important to include in our description. Already describing a target system as “small farmers using outdated equipment advocating for state protection” is already a much better description of a typical system, as opposed to “poor small farmers who are suffering”. We can also not just focus on “technology” without considering social and economic technologies.
  • In complex systems, the behaviour of the system emerges from the behaviour of all the elements in the system. This emerging behaviour, in turn, has an effect on all the elements in the system, which gives rise to complexity. In complex systems there are strong feedback loops between the elements in the system and the overall observed behaviour or purpose of the system. As economies become more complex, and as inter-dependencies between different systems increase, so too it becomes more difficult to predict or anticipate how a system will change, adapt or respond to a change. This means that we have to be more sensitive to the feedback loops. Our greatest weakness is that we are outside the system, but this can also be turned into a strength if we use our distance to provide a neutral perspective on how the system seems to be behaving.
  • Even if we acknowledge that complex systems also frequently resist change, it is necessary to acknowledge that complex systems are very sensitive to small changes. Can we identify the areas where the system is least resistant to change? Can we support small safe-to-fail experiments in the areas where the risks seem high? Can we help the system to develop alternative paths that the actors can try out? Let us make sure that we increase the options available to the stakeholders and NOT fall in the trap of pushing stakeholders to adopt a “silver bullet” approach.
  • In complex systems, proximity (closeness) and connectivity (social networks) really matter. Every agent is connected to other agents and to the greater system in many different ways, and each agent typically affects every other agent through their effect on the system and their close neighbours in the system. The behaviour of any given actor affects the perspective and behaviour of other actors who are close to them. This means that we should also work with the existing structures and not create new artificial networks. If your first instinct is that the stakeholders are poorly coordinated and therefore that more coordination is needed, then you are pushing the system in the wrong direction.
  • The starting state really matters. And so does the development or evolutionary past of the system. The history of the system is still very evident in the system, and it affects how the system responds to choices, opportunities, failures and challenges. Thus the future of the system is affected by its past in unpredictable ways. This is why a solution that works in one place will almost certainly not work in another.
  • In complex systems, correlations may be strong, but causation is weak or hard to identify with certainty. In fact, what caused a particular response in the past might have no effect in the future, so perhaps trying to understand causation is in itself a future exercise. It is often impossible to figure out cause and effect and its direction in a complex system. We should not propose interventions with “guaranteed” linear outcomes. We should rather use our resources to assist developing countries to try different ideas by assisting in the creation of multiple viable paths. This is a task with very uncertain outcomes, which is exactly why our counterparts don’t pursue these risky options.

For me, development cooperation and aid need to embrace the principles of complex systems. Dave Snowden, in a Cynefin training arranged by Mesopartner in 2013, commented: “you absorb complexity, you don’t delude yourself into thinking you can eliminate it”. What I am really surprised at is how my clients in the public sector meso institutions and in the private sector find it easy to embrace the principles of complexity, while development programmes resist these same ideas. For so many of the private sector people with whom I am now working, these principles are useful as they help to explain why certain well-intentioned interventions did not yield the expected results.

My frustration is that when we discuss these same principles with aid partners or development cooperation programmes which support the very same institutions with which I am working, they find many excuses for not embracing these principles. For instance, last week I was told that “we need a clear project plan (a.k.a. an impact chain), based on a detailed assessment so that we can precisely measure our impact. We need to clearly state and then work towards our indicators so that we have evidence that we have achieved change”. Read that sentence again and count the number of times “we” and “our” are used. It seems to me that development is about delivery or applying resources and not about supporting the evolution and expansion of complex economic systems in developing countries. Never mind how sceptical development organisations are about the insights of local stakeholders as to what is really going on in the system, and how confident they are that they know exactly what the problem and the solution are.

I cannot help but wonder whether aid and development cooperation is systemically unsystemic.

23-07-2019 comment by Shawn. I decided to re-publish this post as I still find the same patterns in development. As a team, Mesopartner has moved deep into complexity thinking and have made profound changes to our consulting practice, research themes and capacity building events. Yet, much remains to be done. We are constantly also challenged by our clients in development who have to meet their funder’s requirements for predictable and quantifiable results, despite the people in these development organisations knowing that their interventions might not be addressing the real needs in a developing country.

Two links for your reading pleasure

Here are two articles for you to consider.

The first is an article by Thomas Fisher on Place-Based Knowledge in the Digital Age. Anyone working on local economic development, regional development and also technological innovation should take a look at this article. Thank you Liza for sharing it with me.

 

The second is an article by Edward Carr on the difference between innovation and technology in development. In my own words, his article highlights how the development fields focus on solutions might actually worsen the problems.

Let me know what you think.

Absorbed into the networks behind the systems we see

Its been a while since I have last posted here. The reason for my absence is two-fold.

Firstly, I am busy with a course offered by Coursera and the University of Michigan about Social Network Analysis (SNA). My business partners and one of our associates in Mesopartner are participating in this course. The course is 9 weeks long and I must admit that it is taking much more of my time than I originally anticipated.

The second reason I am hardly online is that the industrial policy in South Africa is starting to have positive effects on local industry. As I work mainly with the manufacturing sector on topics like innovation systems, industrialization, identifying and addressing market failures, and the competitiveness of regions, it means that there is suddenly an upsurge in demand. The demand is lead by state owned companies that are suddenly obliged to procure manufactured content locally, and by local industries that realize that years of underinvestment and fighting to survive against cheap and sometimes lower quality goods have left many sub-sector uncompetitive.

But these two reasons are also having an effect on each other. I have been applying many of the principles and tools of Social Network Analysis in my diagnostic work for the last 2 years, and for the last year I have been using SNA as my main diagnosis instrument. This recent course have simply forced me to read up more and more on many of the theories and the concepts behind the instruments I have been using. I am still trying to figure out how to do this kind of diagnosis fast, and how to teach these instruments and theories to the practitioners that we (Mesopartner) are working with around the world. At this moment the diagnosis that I am doing in valve, pump, tooling, automotive and industrial equipment is still slow and it takes all my attention.

What is the benefit of taking a SNA approach to sub-sector development?

  1. Well, firstly, a network diagnostic very quickly reveals whether there is a cluster or even a value chain. We often assume that these constructs are real, but in the last few years we have learned that just because all the actors that should be in a chain are there doesn’t mean that a value chain exists. Same goes for a cluster, just because all the elements are there doesn’t mean there is a dense network of cooperation, knowledge exchange and systemic competitiveness.
  2. Secondly, a network view assists with understanding the deeper relationships, trust patterns and information flows in a small part of a real system. These relationships makes it possible to predict how information flows, who the thought leaders are and how influential institutions, leaders, officials and business people are. This is directly relevant for my work with innovation systems.
  3. Lastly, Social Network Analysis also highlights how complex even a single link in a value chain can be. When you look at the spider web of relations, ownership structures, communication channels and knowledge spillovers, then you see how traditional development interventions have completely missed the leverage points.

All I can do at this moment is to commit to blog more frequently once this course is done. I will share some of the results of the industrial diagnosis that I am currently busy with in a few weeks time. Below I will give a sneak preview of the network map of the valve manufacturing cluster in South Africa. You will immediately see that some manufacturers (in red) and some foundries (in blue) are more connected than others. The yellow dots are valve manufacturers that are not yet part of the formal valve cluster structure. Hardly any additional analysis is needed to show that the more connected firms are the ones we should work with.

 

Cluster drawing 4

However, the additional analysis that we can run on this cluster further narrows the choices of whom to work with to get both the highest impact (in terms of both ability to grow their business, increase employment and meet customers needs) and in terms of getting the highest demonstration and spill over effects. The latter is important, because when you want to upgrade an industry you should prioritize firms that are able to create positive spillovers and that others are willing to follow. To do this kind of analysis we need a combination of qualitative and quantitative information, and we use specialized software applications. But more about this in a future post!

Making science and inquiry interesting to a younger generation

One of the challenges that we have to deal with when trying to Universities to work closer with industries in South Africa is a general lack of “inquisitiveness” by younger students. They want management jobs, not jobs in factories, research labs or out there. Well, I guess the problem start at a younger age. But just before you call me a stereotypical or a racist, consider this: Its not only happening here in South Africa. Other countries have the same problem.

So how do we make children more intrigued in science? Well, good teachers sounds obvious. Interesting school projects is another. But how about the media, television and all the other signals that a society broadcast? Here in South Africa, the air is thick with politics and bad news. Our family cannot even listen to the radio on our way to school.

So with all of this said, lets give credit to NASA for this parody on Gangnam Style (for older readers, Gangnam Style is a song that has become one of the most watched videos of Youtube). It explains the work of NASA and several science principles.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=2Sar5WT76kE]

Last year in November I had the privilege to take my family to Washington DC. After 6 days of visiting mostly free museums, like the Smithsonian Air and Space museum, I have 2 eight year old scientists in my house. I confess I also bought several books and gadgets, but hey. THE KIDS want to investigate things. Everything. They want to understand things. They argue about how to solve problems. Although they are in a good school and we try to raise them to be inquisitive, nothing prepared us for this excellent exposure in Washington DC.

So perhaps we should make funny video clips like this one too, targeted at younger people. Lets get younger people to WANT to visit factories, research institutions, universities and labs. Lets get cameras in there and get the message out that we too are working not just on social problems, but also on scientific problems! Science is not just a subject or a project in school, a scientific approach opens up the beautiful mysteries of our world.

2013 – Setting some direction

Perhaps I am taking a risk by publishing some of my resolutions for 2013 here. But this post will probably help me to connect my own learning with those of my close friends, partners and fellow adventurers that follow my blog.

During 2012 my focus shifted strongly into the manufacturing sector where I am working on improving innovation systems, building domestic  industries, strengthening the role of universities and research organizations to create new platforms from where to compete. This is stimulating work where I combine my interests in engineering and science, with soft issues such as networks in industry, market signals and systems and innovation. I also find that my ability to work both with business people, academics and researchers is handy. Take a look at my page Stimulating industrialization, science and innovation to see some of the activities I have been involved with in 2012 in this area.

In 2013 I want to increase my focus on the manufacturing sector. Key research questions for me are:

  • How does competencies learned by organizations such as firms become developmental platforms for industries?
  • How can I use the insights from complexity to accelerate the formation of new industries, new markets and deeper industrialization?
  • How can new technologies, questions, ideas be used to upgrade traditional industries?
  • What is the role of universities and research organizations to upgrade the industries around them?
  • How can learning and experiments in firms be disseminated to accelerate exploration and exploitation of ideas?

As much of my work in this area is focused on Southern Africa, I am also keen to see how some of the insights from here can be tried elsewhere.

As far as my academic research is concerned (I have a post doctoral research fellowship position with the Vaal University of Technology), I must concentrate more on my academic publications and feeding the insights gained in working with industry back into the formal university system. Here my work will be focused on understanding how technological competencies can be created or leveraged to create new markets and new competencies. In the image below

I show the technological choices that a particular group of enterprises that I am working with face.

Of course, the manufacturing sector is a clumsy way to draw a boundary around a system, so just to put some of your concerns to rest, I am still committed to the knowledge and service sectors, technological intermediaries and the local economies in developing countries. I have found that these are useful perspectives to look at manufacturing activities and how it evolves. Manufacturing to me is not only about making products, it is also about matching competence with opportunity within a given societal context. It connects wealthy people with poor people, clever dreamers with needy users, highly qualified people with poorly educated people, nerds with geeks, domestic ideas with international realities.

What makes my approach different is that I am working from demanding customers and markets back to the basic operations, and not from suppliers towards markets. I am not doing marketing promotion, I am developing supply side based on current and future needs. It means that I will help to better articulate demand criteria, and will then try to shape the institutional system and manufacturing capacities to work towards these needs. Central to all of this are developmentally minded organizations like universities, industry bodies and even consultancies that wants to develop a particular sub sector, technological competence or outcome.

In 2013 I undertake not to be a problem solver, but to be a better facilitator of deeper thinking, an adviser that assists my customers and counterparts to better recognize patterns, constraints and opportunities. I will assist my customers to become change agents within the systems that they work in.

Lastly, I want to work more with systemic thinking and complexity. Watch this space for some announces about a new podcast series and a new research field in collaboration with Marcus Jenal

Linking – Beyond Linear Development Trajectories: What if there were 5 clusters of quite different developing countries?

For my first post of 2013 I share a post from “Aid on the edge of Chaos” that I found challenged my thinking. The title and all the content relates directly to the site.

We humans are supposedly very good at recognizing patterns, with some evolutionary theorists even crediting our survival and evolution with this trait. However, we also tend to struggle to see beyond patterns that we have classified, almost like a needle on a old record. Some examples are the way we divide the world into developed and underdeveloped, industrial and emerging. Although we all know that these classifications are in conflict with our own experience of the world (think of the sophistication of the Indian Pharmaceutical sector) we still are trapped in our labels that we use.

Below is a link to a post on Aid on the Edge of Chaos, featuring the work of Andy Sumner and Sergio Tezanos Vázquez where they explore new approaches to classify developing countries.

Beyond Linear Development Trajectories: What if there were 5 clusters of quite different developing countries?.

The image below is from the original post on the Aid on the edge of chaos blog site. Take a look at their post and then think again how you label the countries that you work in.

  • What happens if you classify the countries differently?
  • What are the implications of just changing the classification?
  • How does their classification scheme challenge your own way of classifying regions?
Clusters proposed by Andy Sumner and Sergio Tezanos Vázquez

Counting blessings at the end of a year

I wish all my readers a blessed festive season. Here in South Africa the manufacturing sector is scaling back operations, while consumer goes shopping on a lot of people go on holiday. My strategy is to stay away from large mobs doing shopping, so I have a great excuse to read some, write some, rest some and tinker about my house with my family. I’ve had a great year and I am using this break to also count my blessings.

I want to thank my frequent readers for the messages of support, comments and contributions. During 2012 I have received frequent feedback and contributions from several people who I would like to recognise:

  • Valerie Peters (GIZ) – thank you for really challenging questions and for also valuable contributions
  • Tim Hadingham, for challenging my thinking, sharing ideas, documents and at the same time spreading the word of pragmatic bottom up development
  • Silvia Pella – thank you for taking the ideas I present to serious and for the additional reading and material that you share with me. All the best with your studies – I look forward to supporting you on your adventure.
  • Marcus Jenal, thank you for being so passionate about our shared topic, complexity and systems thinking. You are really good at processing all the stuff we are learning and excellent in taking a lot of people with you in your learning journey.
  • Christian von Drachenfels (VDI/VDE), thank you for sharing publications, ideas, comments, presentations.
  • Tim Kastelle, thank you for the affirmations and for sharing so much of your experience on your blog site
  • Lucho Osorio-Cortes,thank you for your facilitation of the Market Facilitation Initiative of the SEEPNetwork. Also, thank you for involving me as a moderator at the annual SEEPNetwork conference, especially of such an important session where we could play with the topic of complexity, systems thinking and M & E in the development field. Lucho, you are the best facilitator of a knowledge network that I have ever come across.
  • Bart Doorneweert, for adding valuable comments to the posts, and for also sharing your learning and ideas in your own blogsite, Value Chain Generation.
  • Paul Zille, for challenging me to coach your team on the many ideas that I write about, especially on a more “complexity sensitive” approach to value chain promotion.

There are many others who posted a comment, sent me an e-mail, shared a presentation, or asked for advice. I thank you all for reaching out, sharing, challenging, contradicting and for learning with me.

Lastly, I thank my many students in the various courses I present, tutor and supervise for refining my thinking and for including some of my ideas in combination with the wisdom of the many scholars that we have the honor of learning from.

For those that are interested to know, my most popular post was about there being more value to value chains than adding value to products, followed by localization and building domestic manufacturing capacity and supporting business that creates wealth and growth should be our main priority (this was also the most controversial post with lots of e-mails from people sharing my view and venting frustrations about the policies in their organizations). I’ve had 11,502 page views, with the most frequently searched for terms being “innovation vs. invention“, “competition“, “industrialization“, and “market failure“. Recently, my earlier posts on innovation, the service sector and private sector development have been popular, with some posts of 2007 receiving a lot of attention (!!). Several of the posts on this blog have been re-published on other platforms or media, and I have been asked to present many of these ideas at several conferences, seminars, courses and coaching sessions.

So I close with a big “thank you” to all who makes it worthwhile to blog! I wish you all a relaxing festive season and a prosperous 2013. May you discover some new questions that will help you dig deeper in 2013.