Innovation is often easiest to recognize when something is happening in plain sight.
A new partnership is announced. A demonstration takes place. A working group is formed. A study is completed. Each provides visible evidence that an emerging idea is gaining attention and momentum.
But visibility and progress are not the same thing.
Some of the work most critical to implementation happens quietly—and can take considerable time before there is anything visible to show for it.
That creates a challenge: how do we distinguish activity around innovation from progress toward implementation?
A region may have engaged airports, industry, public agencies, educational institutions, utilities, and communities. It may have promising use cases and strong interest in what an emerging technology could make possible.
But participation alone does not create an implementation system.
Innovation scholar Ron Adner offers a useful distinction between participation and alignment within an innovation ecosystem. Participation brings actors into the process. Alignment determines whether they can work together in a way that makes the intended outcome possible.
That distinction becomes more tangible as implementation decisions become more specific and dependencies surface. An infrastructure decision may hinge on utility capacity. An operational concept may create workforce or emergency-response requirements. A use case may change once local needs and constraints are better understood.
At that point, another meeting is not necessarily progress unless something pushes or pulls because of it.
Progress begins when something once fixed in place starts to shift—differences are worked through, roles become clearer, decisions are made, assumptions are tested, and dependencies begin to be resolved.
The meeting is easy to see. What matters is whether it changes the state of play.
That can make implementation difficult to read from the outside. When the wicked work takes time, those doing the work can be mistaken for moving too slowly—or not innovating at all.
Did a dependency get resolved? Did a decision become clearer? Is the region better able to take the next step?
That is when innovation matures into implementation: when those shifts begin to translate into action.
For CAAMCI, that means building those conditions deliberately—not around advanced aviation in the abstract, but around the problems it might actually help solve.
Which raises the next question:
What is your use case?
Sources & Further Reading
Ron Adner, “Ecosystem as Structure: An Actionable Construct for Strategy”, Journal of Management (2017).
Ron Adner and Rahul Kapoor, “Value Creation in Innovation Ecosystems: How the Structure of Technological Interdependence Affects Firm Performance in New Technology Generations”, Strategic Management Journal (2010).
Philip Cooke, “Regional Innovation Systems: Competitive Regulation in the New Europe”, Geoforum (1992).
Ove Granstrand and Marcus Holgersson, “Innovation Ecosystems: A Conceptual Review and a New Definition”, Technovation (2020).
Brian W. Head, Wicked Problems in Public Policy: Understanding and Responding to Complex Challenges_, Palgrave Macmillan (2022).