About the Partnership

What is the Systems Innovation Learning Partnership?

EIT Climate-KIC and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) are collaborating on a Systems Innovation Learning Partnership (SILP) to shift mindsets and grow capabilities that enable sustainable transformations to happen. 

The decisions each of us make and actions we take, as individuals and as members of civil society, corporations, governments and other groups, combine and interact to create larger systems. Many of the biggest challenges we face – the climate crisis, food insecurity, growing inequalities – are difficult to overcome because they are a product of these complex systems interacting.

Creating change at a systemic level requires people to think and work in novel ways, and to collaborate widely with diverse actors who play different roles in a system. However, as it stands, mainstream approaches to tackling complex, multi-scale challenges are either broken or not effective enough, meaning people are not seeing the transformation at the scale needed to tackle urgent issues.

We need to create opportunities for people to come together and learn about what it takes – as individuals and as organisations – to make systemic impact in order to see effective and rapid changes.

Our Systems Innovation Learning Partnership brings together organisations and people working to tackle big issues to collaborate, experiment, learn, and share ideas that help to activate innovation across whole systems. Our activities aim to not only share tools and methods that have had success in creating impact, but to shift mindsets and support people to transform the way we tackle the world’s biggest issues.

Through collaboration and creating communities of learning, the partnership fosters a commitment to continuously learning and adapting to evolving situations, learning together what works and what doesn’t to tackle our most pressing issues. Our hope is to activate radically new ways of approaching the climate crisis, inequalities or other key issues in order to see sustainable transformations that are so urgently needed.

We invite other organisations who work in systems innovation or who are curious about applying systems innovation particularly in the international development and climate impact spaces to join us. If you would like to know more, please contact us via email.

Our activities

Experimentation Fund

This project aims to fund and support around 10 systems innovation experiments and learning approaches in the Global South to create opportunities for new actors, groups and organisations to benefit from systems innovation learning. Funding will be allocated through a participatory grant-making model which will include a process of selecting experiments that prioritises the  learning opportunities between and across a diverse cohort of actors. This so-called ‘portfolio’ of learning opportunities will be supported by a cohort learning programme to enable co-learning and collaboration.  Find out more.

Systems Innovation Learning Festival

Held once a year, this week-long festival of systems innovation activities aims to bring together familiar and unfamiliar stakeholders to deepen and broaden understandings of systems innovation concepts, practice, and applications. The festival is made up of mixed-format sessions, from informational sessions to participatory workshops, allowing cutting edge approaches to systems practice and learning to be discussed and challenged.

Learn more about our Learning Festival 2023.

Deep Dives

Held approximately every six to eight weeks, these facilitated sessions bring together engaged systems innovation leaders and practitioners for a detailed exploration of experiences, approaches and methods. The purpose is to share new information, inspire participants to think about how the concepts could be used in their own work and support participants to implement learnings into their everyday work.

Systems Innovation Learning Labs

With sessions across one to two days, these workshops test a systems innovation approach to addressing a complex challenge or case brought by someone in the community. The sessions are co-designed with the challenge owner to ensure the methodology and workshop approach meets their needs and provides a useful space for testing the application of systems innovation in different contexts.

The Systems Innovation Learning Partnership receives support in taking a Human Learning Systems approach in its design by Centre For Public Impact.

 

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Project Partners