RaMP

The Rainforest Master Plan (RaMP )
The stages of building and innovation ecosystem fit into the Rainforest Master Plan (RaMP), designed to assist communities and organizations in evaluating, understanding and developing the cultural and leadership conditions necessary for evaluating, designing and building effective innovation ecosystems. In many places in this book we have mentioned the importance of context. Every action must be evaluated within the context of the unit of analysis. The RaMP process involves: (1) immersion of community and/or organizational leaders in Rainforest principles of innovation; (2) the creation of working teams to manage the strategic deployment of the assessment tool; (3) training and development of team members in both Rainforest principles and assessment management; (4) an internal communications strategy designed to educate, inform, and align the entire community and/or organization; (5) the assessment process, involving a wide-spread distribution of individuals; (6) the summary and aggregation of assessment results, and the reporting of those results to leaders; (7) the creation and leadership of design-based teams to develop solutions and approaches; (8) the deployment and management of solutions; and (9) the management and leadership of an iterative cycle of re-evaluation and creation of new and/or improved solutions. Within the above basic RaMP stages are: **Stage 1. ** **Assess the System State** **: ** The assessment part of the process institutionalizes language, terms, ideas, and thinking. The process also supports the creation of a baseline measurement that can be used for iterative measurements later. **Stage 2. ** **Gaps & Opportunities** **: ** Gaps and/or high-return opportunities to implement cultural, leadership, frameworks, or resources changes are identified in this critical next step. Tools enable groups to undertake deliberation processes to increase local innovation and do so in a self-organized way. **Stage 3. ** **Design & Build** **: **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">This process focuses on the findings, insights, data, and information discovered during Stages 1 and 2. The basic procedure is to create and deploy work teams addressing specific opportunities or challenges that surface during an assessment. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Typically during RaMP Stage 3 Design and Build groups form, deliberate, and decide on actions to be taken, frequently using the small group patching process (page 165). The process can be summed up as deliberate – decide – evaluate – act. This closes the gap between reasoning and actions, although there may be a time delay between these stages. To qualify the term ‘act’ – in some cases this may mean a plan for carrying out an action rather than an actual action. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">If someone or some group is to carry out an action they must be motivated in some way to avoid too long a gap between accepting the conclusions of a deliberation, its evaluation, and acting on the conclusions. This may seem like an obvious statement but I suspect we have all seen plans that are supposed to result in actions to be taken but which never are. ere. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">For example in cities on each side of a US/Mexican border region, cross-border action planning teams which were set up following application of the patching process, motivated by their agreed goal of improving the quality of life of its citizens through cross-border innovation. Because the teams were highly motivated there were only short time gaps in the deliberate – decide – evaluate – act sequence. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">In Stage 3 Design and Build each RaMP stage groups are formed to collect information and opinions, deliberate, and then making collective decisions on actions to be taken. The Rainforest Scorecard may be completed by individuals and also by groups by collecting information and opinions, and then making a group decision on scores to assign to the 6 Scorecard characteristics. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">A feature of RaMP is that both immediate and longer-term actions to resolve problems are identified during the process so that communities can experience RaMP’s impact. Significant results can emerge from quickly applied small changes, and accordingly the assessment process serves as both strategic background research and an immediate tactical call to action for improving innovation. **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Stage 1 **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> is especially significant as we have noted earlier (property #10, page 30, of complex adaptive systems) namely, that complex adaptive systems are sensitive to //initial conditions//, and self-organizing networks are development path-dependent. Consequently, initial assumptions must be reviewed and their possible effects understood to the degree possible. Therefore the initial immersion will guide further development paths. **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Stage 4. **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> **Ongoing Re-Assessment & Continuous Improvement:** Once deployed, the assessment process is repeated by the community or organization to judge the effectiveness of solutions, improvement in innovation, and changes to underlying conditions which have been made. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">The Rainforest Scorecard provides base data for RaMP Stages 1 and 2. To adequately carry out RaMP **Stage 3**, **Design & Build**, needs more detailed guidance. It is important to know what to look for in building out an innovation ecosystem