As we progress with the Cluj Innovation Fellowships, we regularly take time to reflect on the process and to share our journey. Our perspective is that of a first-time supporter in a pilot program with ambitious intent and a resolute first cohort of fellows. These reflections are also a way of grasping the often invisible ways in which initial intentions interact with new actors in a changing context. These are our live play-outs.

Defining our frame: a prototype-centered fellowship program for systemic innovation

Jargon might be time-saving for practitioners, but it can keep many others away, even the people and practices the jargon describes. Let’s start by unpacking some terms to sketch out our playground.
  • A fellowship is a context to recognize individual professionals as agents of change. It allows an institution to invest in a fellow’s particular approach and leadership, supporting their work to grow and achieve impactful applications.
  • For systemic innovation definitions are less agreed upon. We see it as a way of finding solutions to entrenched problems in ways that would be mindful about not generating a new set of problems. It is the kind of problem-solving that unfolds upstream, closer to where problems originate, rather than at their cascading effects.
  • This work happens in complex and changing environments – a pandemic being quite the illustration – so prototyping to test and improve interventions in a faster feedback process are essential practices in the MO of such systemic innovation.
At the Urban Innovation Unit, we believe that a fundamental innovation, one that may unlock more sophisticated answers and evolve towards problem prevention, catalyzes long-term collaboration and resource sharing between different stakeholders who share ultimate goals, but might currently be working in isolation, unaligned or, unwittingly, in opposition.
This is how we have come to understand our frame, the Cluj Innovation Fellowships. A context to support individual change-makers in their journey to connect stakeholders, resources and problem-solving capacities so as to make a dent in their field of intervention.
Having made this conscious choice of frame, and aware of the power of initial design, our intention is now oriented by the next key question: what does an initiator need to catalyze public-value innovation, that we can help resource?

Selecting for systemic potential: an open call for initiatives concept-proofed in the early response to the pandemic

A first clue towards answering our question came from the open call. Clarity of purpose.
Communicating an opportunity that did not resemble the common grant scheme had its twists. What exactly is systemic innovation? Who is this fellowship for? Could we give examples of people who “fit the bill”? What kind of initiatives are “systemic enough”?
These incoming questions, influenced by years of working within the bounds of constrictive funding, as well as the scarce local references we could offer as illustration, gave us a sense of how green the field of public-value innovation that targets systems change is in Romania.
Scope was also important to get right. The four areas that our research and co-design processes pointed to as having a powerful potential for impact in future emergency scenarios were niched, but could have broad applications – innovative procurement, solutions journalism, collaboration protocols, and open data protocols. Defining these in a way that was both precise and inclusive of the many forms innovations could take, while being careful to avoid prescriptiveness, was its own challenge.
This uncommonness in purpose and specificity in scope would often get us thinking about the odds of finding initiators who would (1) have an initiative in one of four areas (2) that had been concept-proofed in response to the emergency situation brought on by the pandemic and (3) with an awareness for systems and desire for systems-level impact.
We admit that our internal bets on application interest would fluctuate. “This is a pilot, we know we are doing something different. We are in testing and learning mode ourselves” was Anamaria’s heartening reminder. It became a mantra-like response for when partners helping disseminate the call would ask “Are you sure people like this are out there?”
The open call was our way of finding out. We had anticipated some of the questions and prepared to be supportive of those curious about this kind of opportunity.
  • A fellowship is a context to recognize individual professionals as agents of change. It allows an institution to invest in a fellow’s particular approach and leadership, supporting their work to grow and achieve impactful applications.
  • To stay connected to people interested in systemic approaches and engage potential candidates – also with each other, hoping to spark collaborations – we set up a Slack space. We used it to share illustrations of the four areas of innovation, learning resources and announcements about the open call process.
  • Opportunities to connect with the UIU team were appreciated, such as Q&A sessions and online Coffee Breaks – live-streamed conversations with seasoned professionals looking at public-value innovation from different fields of practice and expertise.
  • We also hosted an Application Writing Workshop to leverage applicants’ diverse backgrounds and to clarify questions about the application form. The form was a device to lift up a kind of perspective initiators are not usually encouraged to consider – such as the theory of change, levels of action, nature of challenges keeping the problem alive, or outcomes formulated in terms of influence, types of capital and capacities.
This approach of listening and responding to the “pains” we were hearing by removing the barriers of entry that had to do with understanding what this fellowship program can best support paid off. As did reaching out to nodes in networks of professionals recognized as bridge-builders, in groups exploring complex socio-economic challenges, and in bubbles of experts familiar with the language of systems changes. Numbers rarely show the full picture, but we were excited about ours: 27 applications, out of which 11 candidates have been invited to interview.
The jury’s consideration was not easy. Every candidate told the story of an initiative with an articulated purpose of change made stringent by the pandemic, each deserving of being developed into testable prototypes. Where we were not able to extend an invitation to the pilot program, we suggested other relevant opportunities and connections.
So who are the fellows in our pilot Cluj Innovation Fellowships?
Mihaela Frățilă – Project Manager, World Wide Fund Romania, with an initiative incentivizing the application of green public procurement criteria.
Andi Daiszler – President, Daisler Association, with a program extending access to mental healthcare in crisis situations.
Erika Andrasi – Grant Manager, Brasov Community Foundation,with an initiative supporting local educational reform through a community-based network for collaboration.
Their proposals had addressed aspects the jury believed to be essential: approaches that allowed for testing and adjusting of the initial assumptions, an intuition about the significance of engaging multiple stakeholders and brokering trust, and an openness to adapt their interventions in response to the complexity of the systems they are seeking to change.

Refining initial proposals: greening public procurement, extending access to mental healthcare, and community-sourced educational support initiatives sharpen their innovation approaches at Idea Camp

With fellows selected, we returned to our guiding question: what might an initiator need to catalyze public-value innovation?
The open call outreach had shown prevalent blind spots: missing a category and an “operating system” for contexts to develop and test prototypes, unfamiliarity with imagining the interconnected effects of the four areas for innovation, and the absence of a common language for systemic patterns, behaviors and compounded effects.
It also hinted at some of the conditions, abilities and resources that could make a difference for interventions hoping to influence systems change. Those that the initiators might need, as change agents tinkering with levers, but also those that a support ecosystem should provide, such as certain capacities that make it likelier for an intervention to achieve impact.
To pursue an opportunity meant to catalyze systemic innovation, initiators seem to need:
  • Clarity of purpose and of scope. We chose to center the opportunity on both process (systems-aware innovation) and areas of innovation (procurement, journalism, open data, collaboration) in a specific context (response in emergency situations). We demarcated a challenge without delimiting the ways to get there.
  • A common language to notice relationships and the patterns they form. Building a shared vocabulary about something as complex as systems change takes time. We curated opportunities for initiators to look at their own projects with such a lens, inspired by the kind of questions and practices that pursuing innovation in systems involves (less project management ones, more those of intervention design).
  • References from similar contexts and communities of practice where experiments are frequent, the process gets documented and learnings get shared. Including the learnings that come from failures, which are not treated as wasted investments but as valuable data that communities of practitioners can build upon.
With these reflections in mind, we gathered the fellows, their teams and our facilitators in a Zoom room to officially welcome the first cohort of the Cluj Innovation Fellowships.
The introductions started Idea Camp – 3 days of group workshops and one-to-one coaching sessions. It was a thinking space to refine the proposals with revisited theories of change and strategies to help the fellows leverage their resources towards the most significant outcomes. It included defining what success might look like after the 6-month piloting phase, setting self-defined milestones that we could return to, come September.
Another goal of the Idea Camp was to support fellows in mapping their assets and stakeholders, starting to explore potential “missions” for each, and to identify what other kind of resources they might need so as to achieve their outcomes in procurement, mental health and secondary education. This ID of expertise, people and organizations informed our briefs for mentor-scouting.
A simple empathy-building exercise, introducing each others’ proposals, set the tone for an experience that compensated for some of the missing physical togetherness. There was a budding sense of camaraderie in a hard to predict but exciting journey. The Idea Camp days offered new perspectives and new allies, as fellows put it, making spontaneous connections between their interventions’ stakeholders and also between some of their activities’ goals.
Checking in again with our question, to design a prototype aiming at systems-level change, initiators seem to need to:
  • Name and (re)frame the problem, zooming in and out between scales – micro, meso and macro – being intentional about the level their intervention wants to have effects at and continuing to explore the problem until there is a shared sense of asking the right questions.
  • See the system they seek to influence from multiple perspectives, assembling a broader picture and discovering leverage points from which stakeholders with an apparent fixed position can become allies in shifting the dynamic of the system, reinforcing change in the same direction.
  • Prepare for increasing complexity and uncertainty by considering different scenarios and designing requisite adaptability into their interventions’ strategies.
  • Prioritize cultivating relationships to build bridges across silos, sectors, and functions in the ecosystem, stimulating the conditions that allow trust between actors to emerge. That may mean taking on multiple roles, not only as experts or project leads but also as conveners, facilitators, translators and storytellers.
  • Design for intermediary results, including setting and celebrating milestones that have to do with the process (as staying with it is a win in itself) to keep stakeholders involved, showing it is worth engaging with the problem they are all in to solve.

Supporting the journey ahead: practice makes perfect learning

Of course, this is just the beginning of the journey – the fellows’ and ours.
We understand our role as context creators, resource curators and facilitators of a process that is just as new for us as it is for the fellows embarked on this experience. As we pay attention to their needs as ambitious initiators, we reflect on what it is that we can best provide, as support actors in this journey.
So shifting our guiding question a bit, to support the development and testing of interventions looking to change the way systems operate, supporters seem to need to:
  • Be agile profilers and resource initiatives in more ways than with a budget. Funding experimental developments is a vital function of an innovation support ecosystem in a world of complex problems with no silver-bullet solutions. So is anticipating what other kinds of resources could a group of initiators use to be more strategic and systemic about their work
For instance, if the goal is to incentivize the use of green criteria in public procurement, a resource could be someone with an insider’s understanding of the barriers of adoption. If barriers are known, it might be someone who has helped overcome a similar obstacle in a different field. To accompany our initiators’ process, we are matching them with inspiring facilitators and mentors. Their profile is not much different from the fellows’. As we see them, mentors are also a combination of analytical thinkers, pragmatic experimentalists and bridge-builders who have practice in holding both the big picture (the system) and pointed action (the intervention) in mind, modeling a critical ability for systems innovators.
  • Intersect fields of expertise to sharpen intervention design abilities. We view systems thinking as a key knowledge area because it supports this awareness of the whole (the mental healthcare system, for example) and the interacting parts (mental healthcare stakeholders, including patients, service providers, advocacy groups etc.), giving initiators more room to design creative interventions at different points of the relationships between the many actors involved. It opens up a larger spectrum of intervention possibilities.
Given the scale of systemic challenges, it is crucial for this kind of innovation work to discover and use levers strategically, testing acupuncture-like interventions that may shift specific relationships, and through feedback loops, eventually, the whole system. This intervention design work can benefit from insights from many other fields, including behavioural science, design thinking, participatory approaches, coalition building and network science.
  • Hold space for reflection, not inspection, and support communities of practice where learning is prioritized. Implicit in prototyping and testing interventions is a process of reflecting on how an intervention fares out in the real world. It takes paying close attention to how the system reacts to, say, a network of secondary education stakeholders – students, teachers, principals, parents and district inspectors – who meet regularly to explore how to incorporate promising practices into their schools and decide to test an alternative curriculum in a pilot program. Reflecting is driven by the need to learn and adjust the intervention according to the desired, strategic outcome, not by inspectors filling in pre-formatted report.
Systemic innovations often generate unintended effects, positive and negative alike, and rigid measurement systems cannot account for something they did not set out to measure, especially second and third order effects. Appraising effects against initial intentions creates precious insights, not only for the team but for the innovation field itself. Ecosystem partners can help convene learning spaces for practitioners and keep reflection processes alive.
This list is but a start in noticing all the ways in which changing systems can happen through creative piloting, supported by different actors with different roles. It takes an ecosystem to resource systems changing leaders and to create the conditions for agile experimentation and learning.
Access to mental healthcare in times of generalized crisis, green principles embedded into public procurement, and school education upgraded and connected to community assets – our fellows’ initiatives – are systems-level interventions. Each operates at different levers and considers different stakeholders, but they have in common a focus on building relationships that can sustain long-term collaboration. Our own role at BIC is to help expand their capacity for interventions that move further upstream, targeting the root causes of the systemic problems their interventions hope to shift.
The Cluj Innovation Fellowships are an activity within the Cluj Future of Work project, financed through the European Fund for Regional Development, through Urban Innovative Actions.
Cluj Future of Work is co-managed by the Municipality of Cluj-Napoca and Cluj Cultural Centre in a consortium with eight other local organizations: Art and Design University of Cluj-Napoca, Cluj IT Cluster, Intercommunity Development Association Cluj Metropolitan Area (ADI ZMC), Transylvania Creative Industries Cluster, Transylvanian Furniture Cluster, Transilvania International Film Festival, Transylvania IT Cluster, ZAIN Transylvanian Creativity Festival.