The (Re)Design of Ecosystems to Face Grand Challenges—Toward the Management of Creative Evolution

ABSTRACT Today's grand challenges have to be discussed comprehensively, addressing the current design and the redesign of social and economic ecosystems. Tackling grand challenges requires a step into the unknown, a situation that is well‐characterised today as strongly different in nature from uncertainty and requires specific types of management. This opens the door to radical changes in ecosystems' configurations (new values, new interdependencies and new independencies). Hence, our call for papers for this special issue asked about (re)designing ecosystems to face grand challenges. The papers of this special issue analyse a great variety of empirical situations (energy, organised crime, wind‐energy–air quality). They elaborate extensively on how one can manage the complex intertwined processes that lead to exploring both new products/services associated with grand challenges and new collaborations in the ecosystem, enabling the commitment of new players in new partnerships. This editorial highlights three pivotal constructs deriving from the contributions: (A) ‘generativity enhancer' as a critical type of action/actor in the redesign of the ecosystem; (B) creative preservation as a critical factor shaping performance; and (C) necessary methods for creating/sparing effective multiple local design spaces. Building on the constructs, it concludes by discussing the (re)design of ecosystems as creative evolution and how to manage it.