In my work with trying to get the private sector to perform better, I often deal with sectors and their support institutions. Very often there are official or recognised industry bodies that are promoting the interests of industry. The least these industry bodies do is to organise an annual golf day, with some even playing an important role to lobby with government. The more organised sector bodies play an active role in sharing information, promoting standards amongst their members, or in some cases actively trying to develop their members or new markets. So these industry bodies often try to affect change in the way I described in the previous post.
But although these organisations are functional units themselves, they are actors trying to promote change in a small part of a society. This means that while they can affect change internal to their organisation through formal change or organisation development methods (using hierarchies, sanctions, incentives and process management), they have to also play a leading role in changing the society around them. The members of the industry body, their supporters and the broader innovation system related to this industry body is not physically part of the organisation, but forms a sub-group of the society around the industry body.
Several challenges arise in this process of trying to get a part of a society to change. The first challenge is that this process of upgrading the performance of industry is often not recognised as a change process. Secondly, societal change is a tough thing to do, and the body of knowledge on how to achieve change in societies is still in infancy. Thirdly, to affect change in a society it is important to appeal to the common identity or value system of the group being targeted, and very often both these factor are weak within industries. For example, some pharmaceutical companies consider themselves to be in the cosmetic sector, while others in health. This means that even if we classify a firm in a given sector, they may still identify more with another sub-group in the society.
For instance, in my earlier post I mentioned the importance of leaders using value systems to lead through example. How can this be related to trying to change the performance or behaviour of an industry? The answer is that we have to make positive examples of those that are early adopters, or leaders. By showing how some firms innovative, or overcome problems through innovative thinking, creates opportunities for others to imitate. Furthermore, industry bodies cannot really use incentives or sanctions to inspire change. However, they can play an extremely important role of communicating why behavioural change or improvement is necessary. If industry bodies cannot build a better case for why firms need to pull up their socks, cooperate better, compete more, innovate or invest, then nobody else will be able to achieve this until it is too late.
Thus, industry bodies have a critical role to play in using their organised members to inspire behavioural change or performance improvement. This process must be understood as a change process at the level of the society. The desired change must be seen in a systemic way to make sure that individuals are not just thinking about measurable improvements (such as time to assemble a gadget) but to also consider the societal change aspects (how to recognise the new values or how to know whom to follow)