Greenway works to understand and implement the most effective and innovative approaches to business, community and economic development. Fostering innovation requires an understanding of, and ability to shape, the “innovation ecosystem” in such a way that innovation and development become natural, emergent properties of the system. It’s not unlike tending a garden ecosystem to ensure that new growth has the best opportunity to thrive.

Innovation and System Boundaries
Fostering innovation requires an understanding of, and ability to shape, the broader systems in which institutions–such as businesses, schools or nonprofit organizations–reside.

Defining system boundaries can help organizations develop innovations by clarifying system parameters, identifying key leverage points and problems, and better exposing potential solutions. In addition, a key source of innovation can be the ability to see across system boundaries–to apply ideas from one area to another–or to dissolve the boundaries altogether and look at things holistically.

Building Connections

We help people make connections between systems, ideas, and each other.  And we strongly believe that one of the most important connections we can make is the connection between our children and their future. We want children to be motivated to learn and to tie what they are learning into their vision and ultimately creation of the future.  We have begun the Learn to Connect project with this idea in mind.

Some of our strategies to foster innovation include:

• Creativity and Entrepreneurship (page coming soon)
• Open Space Collaboration. Greenway helps design and facilitate innovative participatory processes using the Open Space Technology (OST).  Using OST we helped organize the Community Created Humboldt sessions. Read more
• Regenerative Design. Thinking beyond sustainability means assessing how people can integrate with and actually regenerate, not just sustain, natural systems.  Through regenerative design, we regenerate ourselves, the ecosystems in which we live, our communities, schools and businesses. Read more
• Resilience and Adaptation Planning. Greenway helps plan communities and organizations that are resilient and adaptable. Resilience is the ability to undergo a disruption and to rebound with prior system dynamics still intact. Read more
• Transition Management. Transitioning to more sustainable societies brings both environmental and economic benefits.  Through a “transition management ” approach, multiple options and adaptive policies are simultaneously explored, providing for new systems that are not implemented but “grown” in a gradual manner. Read more