Innovation once led markets; now it leads systems—shifting from driving competition to orchestrating collaboration across boundaries, aligning diverse actors around shared innovation ambitions. It means the most significant value creation now happens through coordinated innovation that no single actor could achieve alone.
Innovation no longer ends with a product launch. It’s a continuous, adaptive process evolving across ecosystems, platforms, and contexts—where relationships, capabilities, and value creation mechanisms co-evolve.
Success is no longer just market share or operational efficiency. It now requires the ability to reconfigure entire socio-technical systems—transforming how value is co-created, how actors relate, and how societies function.
Meta-innovation is a higher-order framework that reconfigures how innovation processes work across organisational, ecosystem, domain, and socio-technical boundaries.
While traditional innovation creates new things, meta-innovation designs new ways for diverse actors to innovate together toward shared transformative visions. It's about orchestrating the innovation process itself to work across boundaries and levels simultaneously.
Developed through rigorous research, the Meta-Innovation Canvas translates cutting-edge theory into practical guidance for system transformation.
It’s organised around five interconnected components that together enable coordination, learning, and scaling across levels and domains.
Whether you’re designing transformative programmes, leading ecosystem change, or conducting research into systemic innovation—this is your invitation to co-create with us a global community shaping the next frontier of innovation practice.
Spans organisational and sector boundaries.
Requires alignment across technological, social, environmental, and economic dimensions.
Demands new forms of collaboration and governance.
Aims for system-level transformation, not just organisational success.
Co-design meta-innovation strategies tailored to your context.
Prototype and test the framework in live transformation environments.
Generate shared insight that advances both practice and theory.
Create case studies and learning resources that strengthen the wider ecosystem.
This is an open invitation to collaborate—whether you’re a business, public institution, NGO, or network facilitator working at the intersections of systems change.
We’re also seeking partnerships that push the boundaries of innovation research—investigating how meta-innovation emerges, scales, and institutionalises across contexts.
Comparative studies of meta-innovation across sectors and geographies
Capability research exploring leadership and coordination practices
Digital integration—how AI, platforms, and data infrastructures enable collaboration at scale
Policy and governance frameworks that balance agency and accountability
Grand challenges such as climate adaptation, circular economy, and regenerative food systems
We're particularly interested in partnerships that combine rigorous research with practical application, generating insights that advance both theory and practice.
Meta-Innovation emerged from rigorous academic research into how innovation itself is evolving to meet the complexity of contemporary challenges. Based on the doctoral work of Shereen Amos at the Business Science Institute, this framework marks a fundamental advance in how we understand and orchestrate transformative innovation across boundaries and levels.
