Digital ecosystems and SEED co-innovation in education

SEED (Social, Economic and Environmental Development) is fundamentally based on education, resource allocation, local-led innovation, and collaboration in all three SEED-areas. Radical change for SEED is possible and required, as Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker outlines in Factor 5 [1]. He provides examples for transforming the global economy on an economic path that is environmentally sustainable by increasing the resource productivity by factor 5 in various sectors in the industrialized regions, while being economically more profitable and balancing quality of life priorities. For developing regions, their development path could consequently take place in a much less resource inefficient way than for industrialized regions in the past. This paper focuses on education as a precious resource for SEED. Education is positioned within the context of the Cyber-Physical Environment of our evolving Digital Ecosystem (DE). A local-led innovation project, named “Sovereign Self-Unfolding Education” is referred to as a best practice process. It is put in context with the momentum in this area, and it's relation to the DE-paradigm. This paradigm is based on cooperation between actors and acknowledges competition (cooptition), in order to spur co-innovation in the people, public and private sectors (3Ps). The position paper argues for inclusion of these into the SEED-Framework of iFOSSF (International Free and Open Source Solutions Foundation).