So why is finding the right skills and competencies for innovation a real challenge but so essential?
How do we know the critical skills, competencies and capabilities for innovation? Also, what are the additional dependencies for sustaining innovation capabilities that are becoming vital to understand so an organization can place the appropriate resources behind them, build upon a sustainable future and leverage these innovation dynamics?
We often miss or fail to ask which skills or attributes are critical to providing a more significant impact for a successful innovation solution. What naturally occurs can be only having access to a fundamental building block, like a dedicated innovation team. This will often stay limited in outcomes as it may lack the necessary skills, understanding, or capabilities to tackle complex challenges. The result will provide a limited impact on finding the best solutions to these complex challenges and problems we often need to tackle.
We stifle and lose the real potential by not having the correct dynamics of innovation on offer. Recognizing the skills, competencies, capabilities, and capacity needed does constantly differ by the problem tackled. We must identify what is needed and the gaps to be plugged through a comprehensive fitness framework that can be applied constantly.
Completing transitions through innovation, ecosystems and sustainability thinking
Today, our innovation activity needs to transition through collaborating and co-creating, applying ecosystem thinking and platform designs for business. We increasingly recognize the future value and impact for businesses to grow, is through combining innovation, and external collaborations, and ensuring solutions are more sustainable.
We need to have a new open architecture for undergoing this transformation that is scalable and built, combining technology and tools, for speed and effectiveness.
Making Sustainability central to innovation capability building requires a new ecosystem-designed way that connects the parts.
Let me tell you my story of what I believe; it continues to evolve
Today’s challenge is to build the capacity, competencies and capabilities to be different, more resilient and resourceful. These need to be built upon a deep appreciation of what innovation can provide; the stimulus for creative solutions that have sustained lasting growth.
Converging ideas and thinking brings out creativity and different innovative solutions
Innovation ecosystems are gaining good traction to build out a more robust innovation management system that can offer the interconnected network of organizations the opportunity to create and commercialize new ideas, concepts, products and services.
Participating in innovation ecosystems does have a number of advantages
Greater access to a wider range of resources and expertise through the bringing together of a diverse set of organizations that can bring together technologies and customer insights from different perspectives, drawing in different resources not usually available to one organization to offer a greater potential to innovate more effectively, in choice, options, shared thinking and risk.
Increased collaborations and co-creation through innovation ecosystems can foster the greater potential for collaborations and co-creations between associated parties that can “trigger” innovations that feed from these growing cooperations forming between the parties
Greater scalability and speed. By leveraging the resources and capabilities of other organizations, the potential to scale the innovation efforts in new ways, across different channels, not open to one organization and give different levels of speed from the establishment and reputations the partners have built up in their respective markets.
Greater flexibility and adaptability in different, more collective and imaginative ways. Multiple alerts to market changes, conditions and customers’ needs can stimulate a growing adaptability and solution design, more modular or progressive in response
Greater potential for sustainability and social impact. Innovation ecosystems increasingly need to be designed to offer more sustainable and socially responsible solutions,having partners who manage different parts of the lifecycle, can create opportunities in designing redundancy and ease of replacement that extends and expands a product’s solution, giving an ongoing positive impact while achieving re-occurring business success.
Having a purposeful innovation ecosystem, well-designed and built for highly collaborative partnerships can yield very different results than managing innovation alone. These are not one-size fits, the understanding of what is needed to turn an ecosystem concept into a winning one may have specific needs for one group, compared to another. Multiple ecosystems allow for the ability to bring together the specific partners needed to achieve one goal but recognize these changes, depending on the challenges and complexities of any innovation concept requiring this collaborative approach.
Innovation ecosystems should be dynamic and highly adaptive, as participants join, others leave as different solutions are sought and evolve from collaborations, co-creation, new technology and new business model emerges
The key is to create an environment that encourages and supports the flow of open sources of ideas and resources among like-minded participants and enables them to collaborate and learn from each other in mutually beneficial ways to advance their specific business.
Future connected industry ecosystems will be highly collaborative
Seizing breaking opportunities, dealing with disruptions, and delivering on more demanding customer needs are raising the complexity of managing today in our business environments.
The growing recognition is the need to build flexible ecosystems; of partners where access to a diverse on-demand set of talent, knowledge, expertise, resources and capabilities needs a broad approach in today’s world to meet these complex challenges they seem to multiply daily.
In thinking and design, ecosystems offer a different growth path and stability than the previous “go it alone”. Engagements with partners can offer shared data, new, fresh insights, the ability to share costs, shared operation experiences, and expertise to help build new approaches to more ‘connected’ collaborative innovation.
Ecosystems – the need to be re-stated for Business
What are the significant differences between Natural and Business Ecosystems? I wanted to look at this and make some observations and comparisons. Firstly what we seem to get wrong in many labelling of business ecosystems, where sustainability fits, and then attempting to show apparent differences between Natural and Business Ecosystems needs a greater appreciation of differences.
We label far toomuch as Business Ecosystems.
Applying the label of “Ecosystems” to everything degrades the understanding of its true intent. Ecosystems need to be appreciated as vital and recognized as radically different in how they function and operate.
We call something an “ecosystem, ” which simply provides a rubber stamp of being politically correct, showing the day’s currency, and trying to represent what this means provides additional value or impact. Ecosystem thinking and design are fundamental challenges to how existing organizations go about their business.
Many businesses are claiming “ecosystem” but are, in fact, extending their present, established open innovation activities and placing a greater emphasis on open networking to seek out diverse ideas. This extension alone is not new Ecosystem thinking or design; it is existing thinking.
For nearly all business entities, the ability to fully connect up the organization across people, processes, design, structures and strategies is always a work-in-progress, never worked upon to the fullest extent and rarely achieved without the most radical transformation.
I come up against the barriers to change caught up consistently in this lack of interoperability. So I have to bring it into this exploring ecosystem and platform designs posting views.
What do we miss in not having that connectivity? Recognizing silos of unconnected knowledge needs changing; we need to leverage all of our diversity and expertise. Do you really know your capabilities, competencies and capacities?
Focusing on making technology work across organizations, internally and externally, with partners that share a common purpose. Our need is to find new growth engines and, more, sustaining. business value. it is our understanding to make exchanges work to enable creativity, and we need technology across processes to talk to each other- called interoperability.
Uncertainty, fear of the unknown, reluctance to share and partner, or to mutually “pool” intellectual property or our research know-how in a shared collaborative effort is hard. We often hold onto our knowledge as our “source of power”, this we need to let go of and embrace a new way of believing, trusting and collaborating. We will gain far more than we lose.
We must ask the important questions and fully recognize the answer to “what do we do well? How can we leverage and build out from this?” Are we investing enough time in networking, exchanging insights or building relationships? Knowing our core capabilities, competencies, and capacities is essential.
Let’s tackle one tough one- interoperabilitymakes or breaks much of what we struggle to do -exchange knowledge.
The need to leverage our existing core first in any change
Embracing our core and leveraging these to the best of our abilities is a great place to start undertaking and preparing organizations for necessary change. This begins a journey so it is not simply efficiency we are looking for but achieving a much higher level of effectiveness to be ready to make changes ahead less disruptive.
Do you really know your capabilities, competencies and capacities?
In most cases, an organisation has a capable, familiar core – and improving the performance of this core will contribute a significant value at a lower cost and faster than introducing new tools, but the need is to understand the how, where and what.
Existing tools don’t often require being replaced by new technologies, but knowing the data flow and having greater analytics needs changing, updating and improving. Changing and improving existing processes can be much faster than introducing new approaches and tools requiring new skills.
Is this the early adopter stage for shifting towards a new Ecosystem design? Build on what you have first and then make a staged, purposeful move towards a change that is transformational, partly gained from learning from the existing first.
ChatGPT supports extracting human knowledge through AI learning
I decided to find out what ChatCPT had as “thoughts” on both Business and Innovation Ecosystems. So in a short set of questions, these were the replies.
I have focused on Ecosystems and technology Platform understanding since 2016. I have written much of my learning here on this posting site. So far, these insights have built over 100 posts on related subjects or side issues with different degrees of influence over understanding ecosystems and platforms in their design structures and how to build them.
Business Ecosystem understanding is still emerging in the collective understanding of many business organizations. I hope, by default, they do not revert to small experiments unless in a very selective and focused way to understand certain parts of the differences that ecosystems bring.
These chats with ChatGPT are not bad; they provide a good sense of the logical structure and value of Ecosystems that I wanted to share here as a good starting point or reference for those looking to understand some of the basics around business and innovation ecosystems.
Building blocks towards Ecosystem thinking and designing
Part-way through 2022, I drew up a list of my focal points in researching, stimulating my thinking and finding different validation points on my Ecosystem thinking and design approaches. In early January this year, I took a stop, more a reflective period in these past months, to deepen down even further my knowledge of Ecosystem thinking and design. I aim to achieve, even advancing, Ecosystem understanding for those interested to learn and seeking advice through direct engagements.
My main focus on Ecosystems comes from the innovation perspective. How can we finally combine all the different parts of the Innovation system into one, fully connected up and achieve a far more open design where contributors, both inside and outside organizations, can contribute as it is the diversity of experience needed today to give fresh value and impact on complex and challenging issues, We need that discovery to commercialization fully connected up to be leveraged fully in all the diversity of contributions.
Innovation in its challenges and problems has become more complex and challenging, both in solutions offered and in working out all the connected parts to provide products or services that are superior to the existing ones. The need to provide that essential “dynamic” of having customer engagement in their data, a growing network of connected partners providing their input, their exploring and experimenting so the inventor can learn and seek to improve the product or service accordingly.
Viewing the stages of the Virtual Industrial metaverse journey
The Industrial Metaverse has really “announced” itself this year. For me, it accelerated in my attention once Siemens and Nvidia announced their partnership to explore the Industrial Metaverse in early July.
The announcement came at the launch of Siemens Xcelerator, a digital platform and having both announcements made at the same event had a more extensive “bang” with the more attention-grabbing one, announcing the Industrial Metaverse partnership, in my view, overshadowed the other, the Siemens Xcelerator, which forms the Siemens building block towards this industrial future and the essentials required of a digital platform to accelerate any businesses digital transformation.
“Siemens Xcelerator is an open digital business platform that will accelerate digital transformation. Now companies of all sizes can access the digital technologies to transform how they compete, collaborate and connect“- Siemens website.
Through this open digital business platform, Siemens Xcelerator is featuring and building a curated portfolio of IoT-enabled hardware and software, a powerful ecosystem of partners, and a marketplace.
The journey is moving towards the Industrial Metaverse and I see it evolving in this way
