Do wicked problems demand creative collaborations?

For the last 10 months, I've been working on a $50M Co-operative Research Centre (CRC) bid with five universities in Australia: RMIT, UTS, QUT, UWA and Newcastle.  It's called Design for Cities and Regional Centres.  This will focus on the wicked problems in our urban environment.  Our cities are full of these wicked problems – but what's a wicked problem?  Well, it's extremely hard to solve, and generally considered intractable.  Our theory is that if we are going to dislodge these problems and resolve conflicting requirements, we have to go beyond the traditional design team and bring all of the city stakeholders to bear on the issues.  This takes us closer to notions of web-based crowd sourcing and further away from generally unsatisfactory public consultation methods.  The approach will be design-led in terms of process, as well as collaborative and transdisciplinary.  It will also engages in 'deep practice' – the subject of a symposium chaired by Mark Burry and Terry Cutler for the RMIT Design Research Institute last month.  We see the need for creative collaboration across all the disciplines: bankers and funds, developers, government, planners, design teams, contractors, citizens.  We're also promoting the idea of a creative commons to industry participants so the value can flow through our system.  The book of wicked problems summarises our findings from over 30 meetings with industry and four workshops with over 100 participants.

To quote from  2010's book "Macrowikinomics – Rebooting business and the world", by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams: “For large and small companies alike, new models of mass collaboration provide myriad ways to harness external knowledge, resources and talent for greater competitiveness and growth. For governments and society as a whole, evidence is mounting that we can harness the explosion of knowledge, collaboration and business innovation to lead richer, fuller lives and spur prosperity and social development for all.”