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Public-private ecosystems are central to the functioning and provisioning of most essential ecosystems, e.g., security, healthcare, education, and the environment. These ecosystems face challenges of governance, diverse constituencies, numerous advocacy organizations, incompatible outcome metrics, and persistent media attention, to name a few. There is a wide range of public and private players involved in operating, sustaining, and investing in these ecosystems, including stakeholders from government, industry, academia, non-governmental organizations and the overall public. Fundamental change requires understanding a wide range of interests and accommodating change strategies accordingly. Problems in these ecosystems easily qualify as “wicked problems,” which are social or cultural problems laced with incomplete or contradictory knowledge, large numbers of people and opinions, substantial economic burdens, and the interconnected nature of these problems with other problems. Transforming Public-Private Ecosystems addresses these challenges for four important ecosystems, and provides an integrated perspective for understanding and enabling change. An overall analytic framework is presented and illustrated with 36 case studies of change and innovation.

This chapter sets the stage by defining and illustrating the concept of public-private ecosystems, contrasting the relative roles and priorities of both public and private enterprises. The notion of enterprise transformation is introduced, and fundamental findings in this area are summarized. The broad construct of innovation is reviewed and its relevance in public-private ecosystems discussed. Key questions include what are public-private ecosystems and why are they important? What is enterprise transformation and why is it difficult? What is innovation and why is it difficult? This chapter concludes with a brief articulation of how the rest of the book will unfold.

This chapter addresses the structure, processes, and stakeholders of the higher education ecosystem. Five historical innovations are considered including the Morrill Land-Grant Acts of 1862 and 1890, the formation of the Agricultural Extension Service in 1914, the GI Bill in 1944, the formation of the National Science Foundation in 1950, and the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980. Potential contemporary innovations include computational modeling of the future of research universities and impacts of resource demographics of particular institutions. Opportunities for transformational investments, as well as enhancing the STEM talent pipeline are discussed. The resource bases of institutions are shown to be highly significant in terms of possible strategies and, consequently, what types of innovations may be feasible. Also of great importance is the need for detailed understanding how to attribute revenues and costs across processes.

This chapter addresses the multi-level structure of the national security ecosystem and its many varied stakeholders. Five historical innovations are briefly summarized. The types of future innovations needed are considered as well as how these innovations might be enabled. The ways in which enterprise transformation might facilitate these changes are considered, including how such investments could be economically justified. Contemporary innovations in national security that are discussed include human effectiveness investments, value-centered organizations, the acquisition of military ships, and technologies for airborne surveillance and reconnaissance. It is shown that new approaches to investment valuation provide substantial increases in management flexibility.

This chapter describes the healthcare delivery ecosystem in the U.S., including its structure and key stakeholders. Particular attention is paid to the highly fragmented U.S. ecosystem. Past innovations reviewed include the Flexner Report of 1910, the Social Security Act of 1935, the Medicare and Medicaid legislation of 1965, the Affordable Care Act of 2010, and the pandemic-induced widespread adoption of telemedicine. Contemporary innovations considered include scaling of successful trials, computational policy analysis, approaches to population health, and emerging assistive technologies. These innovations can be enabled by analytics and incentives that address the problems of fragmentation. This approach to transformation requires stakeholders to think differently and learn to collaborate and coordinate. The economic justifications of these investments can be facilitated by broadly-based accounting for revenues, costs, and savings.

This chapter addresses the impacts of global warming, stakeholders in energy and climate, and the structure of the global ecosystem, including the geopolitics and economic dependencies on fossil fuels. Past innovations reviewed include the formation of the United States Weather Bureau in 1890, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in 1970, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970. Also discussed are Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) Standards enacted in 1975 and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, formed in 1988. Contemporary innovations discussed include innovations in the automobile industry, driverless cars for disabled and older adults, approaches to managing failures, and designing policy portfolios. Incentives to facilitate transformation of this ecosystems are considered. The economics of transformation include needs to appropriately attribute revenues, costs, and savings across stakeholder organizations and the ultimate question of who benefits and who pays.

This chapter provides the analytic framework for addressing the case studies discussed in Chapters 3–6. Multi-level models of complex systems are discussed and illustrated. The notion of complex adaptive systems is introduced in conjunction with discussion of wicked problems. This provides inisghts into the complexity of problems being addressed. A human-centered design methodology is described in terms of how it can be employed to address wicked problems. Interactive visualizations, often associated with this methodology, are discussed. Economic valuation of investments in solving wicked problems is considered, including how investment portfolios can be characterized and value estimated for the elements of a portfolio.

What is common across the four ecosystems? The drivers of innovation in the historical cases studies are summarized as: needs for change—war, disease, energy, or organizational challenges; opportunities for change—e.g., exploiting IP, telegraph, telemedicine; leadership—presidents but also other champions; and organization—abilities to execute and influence key stakeholders. The application of economic models across the four ecosystems is considered, emphasizing the need for integrated cross-cutting views of revenues, costs, and savings. Proposals for investments across the four ecosystems are outlined for data integration, knowledge management, interactive visualizations, and artificial intelligence. The need for shared metrics, methods, and tools is argued. Workforce implications are discussed as a central issue across the ecosystems.

The complexity of health cannot be adequately explained with a representation that only captures one level of abstraction of the ecosystem Multiple levels of abstraction are needed to comprehend the full range of forces that affect the health of a population These levels are outlined and run the gamut from cells to society, ranging from aberrations of immune system signalling to society's values and norms Computational modelling of this multilevel system can enable both understanding and managing the complexity of health This is illustrated in contexts that include Washington, DC, and New York City

Under a new wave of artificial intelligence, the transportation industry is facing a revolution similar to machines replacing animals one century ago. In this time, humans could, for the first time, be fully out of the control loop of personal transportation. However, revolution comes with disruption and uncertainty. This paper focuses on mapping various causal relationships during this significant transition phase and understanding the impacts of different influencing loops. A systems dynamic model is constructed including two different transportation methods (personal owned vehicle and car services) and three autonomy levels (non, semi, and fully). The US auto insurance industry was chosen as a major industry that will be impacted by autonomous vehicles’ impacts and consequences. Consumer choices, product familiarity, and acceptance are modeled to represent purchasing behavior. Vehicle crash rate and loss ratio are considered to calculate the insurance industry's premium collections. Different scenarios are quantified and discussed. Several important causal loops are identified that will help achieve the faster growth of the technology. Several potentially new insurance products are evaluated.

The First International Conference in Systems and Network Medicine gathered together 200 global thought leaders, scientists, clinicians, academicians, industry and government experts, medical and graduate students, postdoctoral scholars and policymakers. Held at Georgetown University Conference Center in Washington D.C. on September 11-13, 2019, the event featured a day of pre-conference lectures and hands-on bioinformatic computational workshops followed by two days of deep and diverse scientific talks, panel discussions with eminent thought leaders, and scientific poster presentations. Topics ranged from: Systems and Network Medicine in Clinical Practice; the role of -omics technologies in Health Care; the role of Education and Ethics in Clinical Practice, Systems Thinking, and Rare Diseases; and the role of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine. The conference served as a unique nexus for interdisciplinary discovery and dialogue and fostered formation of new insights and possibilities for health care systems advances.