Strategic advice to leverage new technologies

Christina Bidmon, Laura Piscicelli, and Iryna Susha, along with Devin Diran, Francesca Ciulli, and Albert Meijer provide four core messages. First, that a successful twin transition requires rigorous conceptual and empirical research that provides us with the tools and insights to help navigate the complexities of the transition. Remarkably, the second core message entails a warning to stay clear of tech optimism, which speaks directly to issues related to unintended consequences. Digital innovation can be the key to sustainability but will not solve all our problems — often, other approaches and nature-based solutions should be prioritized. Third, Bidmon et al. highlight the need to understand the factors that facilitate or prevent collaboration for digital sustainability. Finally, the authors point out that neither policies nor businesses can achieve the twin transition alone; rather, comprehensive policies are needed to provide smart incentives for businesses to engage responsibly.

Aspen Institute Fellow Alessia Falsarone sheds light on an often-overlooked aspect of digital sustainability: the digital talent needed to manage digital sustainability solutions. Unlocking the benefits of digital sustainability and managing its unintended consequences requires the right digital talent. Falsarone’s best practices for growing the talent pool for digital climate transformations include: (1) identifying climate-resilience skills and capabilities, (2) leveraging collaborative tools and research for learning, and (3) embracing AI and feedback for advancement. Finally, going beyond the perspective of a single firm, she presents best practices for building and leveraging stakeholder networks for digital talent: leveraging living laboratories, fostering diverse networks, and championing collaborative initiatives.

Damla Diriker and Amanda J. Porter team up with Ilse Hellemans from the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) to show how we can use digital innovation for mission-oriented innovation policies. Based on several years of research and practice, they present crowdsourcing as a vehicle for mission-oriented policies. The ability of digital innovation to leverage the “wisdom of the crowd” facilitates policy agenda-setting because it allows initial broad exploration and refinement into sub-challenges. It also promotes solution development through targeted experimentation and broadens the scope of experimentation. Finally, it facilitates policy implementation by collecting local insights on planned interventions and testing and gathering feedback on implementing interventions.

This issue of Amplify offers a set of insightful articles from leading researchers and practitioners working on digital innovation for climate action. They share a common message: digital innovation can be the key to accelerated climate action if managed correctly. Of course, it will lead us directly to climate disaster if used irresponsibly. Applying the carefully crafted frameworks presented in this issue can help us avoid the latter and enable the former.

Farmers, commodities suppliers, investors, and governments are well aware of the need for innovation to support more sustainable practices and protect scarce agricultural resources. However, due to the complexity and individuality of farming systems, knowing what tech to invest in and under what circumstances is a significant challenge. As this Advisor explores, recent advances in AI can support these innovation decisions and provide information on the broader direction of relevant emerging technologies.

In this Advisor, data and AI innovation strategist Bill Schmarzo introduces a collaborative, design-centric, human-empowered framework that can help organizations leverage AI to create new sources of customer, product, service, and operational value.

As examples from Southwest Airlines and Delta illustrate, there is a critical need for CIOs to address technical debt within mission-critical systems. Frequent Cutter contributor Myles Suer recently spoke with a group of CIOs about this need and the steps leaders can take to protect these systems. This Advisor shares some of those insights, emphasizing enterprise architecture’s role in eliminating tech debt.

Digital twins have been widely adopted by the aerospace and manufacturing industries, but their potential benefits in the mining industry are only starting to be realized. This Advisor presents a mining industry case study with a focus on data collection, integration, and storage challenges.