Developing Capacity for Innovation in Complex Systems

8 From chaos to complex adaptive systems – innovation as a complex adaptive system

Introduction

With the birth of the scientific revolution (Cohen, 1976) at the end of the Renaissance period, our notion of society and nature started to change. The mechanical ideas and principles that were discovered during this time came to influence not only our views of science, but also our understanding of virtually all facets of life in the west. This view of reality assumes a clear link between cause and effect (i.e. that the universe is orderly and follows laws, and that it is essentially a big, complicated machine), as well as that it is possible to understand things by taking them apart and studying their constituent parts (reductionism). Alongside ...