Our existing business organizations need to envisage a changing world full of disruption that calls for radical constant change. They need to be ready to meet different challenges that will be consistent, complex and highly challenging, require the ability to be highly adaptive, and need high levels of open collaboration.
Connected technology needs to be central to responding rapidly and enabling this more volatile world we are facing. To achieve this responsiveness, organizations need to organize around ecosystems and platform technology approaches. This approach provides the potential ability to deliver an understanding of constant change. One that recognizes it has to be part of a growing collaborating network to thrive in this highly connected, rapidly changing and challenging world.
We need to transform or be (totally) disrupted; this is where knowing your ecosystem and network comes in as the new thinking and design of how this needs to be constructed and understood.
How and where innovation fits will depend on this transforming effect.
We are pretty clear that incremental innovation is just not cutting through to give the types of growth expected. Many outside our existing organizations are standing impatiently at the gates, waiting to come in and take over with market-breaking concepts through different business models.
Today larger organizations are having to face the stark truth. Either they adapt or die. Technology offers them the transforming means but can they, as leaders, take their people with them? It needs bold leadership. Today’s structure of our business cannot afford to try and stand alone. It needs to extend beyond its traditional supporting partners and learn to collaborate with a whole new range of partners, even some previous competitors, to adapt to our different world radically.
We move towards a world of Business Ecosystems.
Ecosystems ultimately produce new business models that often rest on a large capacity for agility, openness, and mutual dependency, sharing and appreciating the values amongst a peer group that all relate to this ‘need for change’ and buy into that collective vision outlined.
Moving from the present position of offering stand-alone specific products and services into a collaborating one, connecting a myriad of services and values as are ‘connecting experience’ being built upon totally different value propositions for the ultimate consumer, is a highly daunting challenge. It ‘upends’ much, if not all, of how our business organizations have been organized around, primarily within themselves; it needs radical change.
Creating a collaborative environment reliant on external partners calls for bold management to instigate such a transformation. It calls for sharing knowledge, IP, and accepting it is the diversity within the network that will offer this new added value, that ‘connected experience’ that gives customers a more seamless ‘bundle’ of solutions that they can tailor and decide. It is highly disruptive to the existing organization’s design.
Today we have this tantalizing prospect, full of innovation promise, well within our reach with today’s technology potential. We live in a connected, constantly adapting world where networks and relationships are the essential hard-wiring connections we all need to construct and nurture.
Adapting to never collaborating fully in control can be unnerving.
In the past, we adapted to meet that specific requirement of that one dominant organization as they controlled the process, dictated the value chain and determined the end result they felt was the right one, but not anymore.
Today you can argue differently why what you see as needed is not the best managed alone; it needs a collaborative effort, as the final arbitrator is the consumer. They have increasingly demanding needs where they want to determine not just freedom of choice but how they want this delivered to them in highly personalized ways.
The Status Quo is history.
The future solutions promise must be clear, personalized, diverse, easy to use and eco-friendly. Achieving solutions requires far more breakthrough innovation and greater challenging of the existing status quo to gain that substantial competitive advantage. It will constantly take organizations out of their existing comfort zones in understanding, collaborating and sharing. It needs a very different level of focused leadership that sees the actual value of a connected future and is willing to drive through the changes this will take and the risks it can mean.
The end result we need to deliver is increasingly calling for innovative solutions in distinctly different, highly connected ways, built from contributions from a broader ecosystem of vested parties into solutions that offer significantly different, radical new customer experiences that can offer new value and meets their needs.
If we think about ecosystems, we need to think differently.
I believe the ecosystem approach will increasingly become the main value-producing stream for innovation delivery. Platforms, strategic partnerships, and offering downloadable marketplace solutions, all requiring new business models, will all be on the agenda of any organization, and ecosystems are the organizing environment to enact these.
A word of caution, think carefully through any move to join or start innovation ecosystems. They potentially have a high, immensely attractive return if managed well and are highly valuable to the participants.
Ecosystems change the status quo; they are nearly always disruptive to the existing markets’ established structures, require immense focus and resourcing to transform, and are expensive to build before you get a return but they can be transformative in a new value and growth.
Yet the prize can be a sustainable competitive position unable to be matched due to this unique ecosystem and highly networked approach, leveraging technology and platform designs.
