Global Crisis, Innovation and Change Management: Towards a New Systemic Perception of the Current Globalization Restructuring

The “crisis of capitalism” is not, of course, an unprecedented discourse in the evolution of economics and the investigation of economic realities. In Neo-Schumpeterian economics crises constitute necessary evolutionary steps, intrinsically linked with breaking ‘moments’ and change. However, what makes the current crisis clearly different, and to a large extent subversive, is its ever increasing complexity and evolutionary-dialectic substance. The mixing of cooperation and competition, on an organizational and macro-economic level, reproduces on a global scale the need for a reconsideration of basic economic mechanisms. It tends to undermine and rapidly destroy the mechanistic relations and structures of all kinds and dimensions that have managed to provide profitability and effectiveness over the recent years. In this context, the search for strategic innovation, constant organizational renewal and the diffusion of production oriented at high technological expertise, seem to progressively become the critical synthetic components for building a new development model at all levels and for all agents of action.This paper focuses on the introduction of a three tier question which could be put forward as follows. First we ask what is the current global restructuring crisis and what would be a new growth model that would lead us to the exit of it on a global scale. Second we address the issue of what kind of innovation mechanisms does such a new model of interspatial restructuring and development require. Finally we analyse why is this new innovative direction — both in global terms and in individual socioeconomic systems — a prerequisite for building new types of effective change management mechanisms.The starting point of our approach is the position that any fragmented approach in the individual aspects of the triangle of global crisis, innovation, and change management, is now analytically misguided and practically powerless. Only an effort to systemically understand the phenomenon, in its constant and dialectic structure, is now an adequate condition for outlining the future developmental path of globalization at all levels of action.