Building out our innovation ecosystem in design and thinking

Why change our thinking and designing around innovation ecosystems?“

For me, ecosystem thinking and design offer fresh ways for accelerating mutual learning, and through this innovation, outcome potential for sharing and knowledge building.

As we build an understanding of the power of digital platforms and ecosystem thinking, we can see gains and new values and realize different opportunities denied to us in the past by a lack of clarity, depth of understanding of what was in front of us but not appreciated, as we were looking at it differently and not seeing its potential in a combined value or bundling.

Today we live in a more connected world; technology has enabled this.

We are becoming far more networked and have a growing awareness of hyper challenges that we are in part resolving. Still, we face many blurring boundaries across market positions, competitors and global trade that need combining our talent and expertise to provide a new set of solutions, delivering on promise and impact. We are in a more complex world, needing different approaches within business organizations.

We hold the promise of liberating potential in resolving wicked problems and opportunities, providing we embrace the potential to combine and share outside our organization and tap into the rich diversity of knowledge, equally keen to collaborate and cooperate to achieve a more cross-cutting innovation that provides solutions to these more complex problems.

Organizations today are no different from the past.

The organization still seeks fresh growth and looks to establish new competitive positions. The organization must be liberated from the straight jacket they so often have “worn” constrained significantly by the current, often disjointed, innovation system and design they have adopted, built in piecemeal fashion over the years. We need a holistic, fully connected, open innovation architecture to exchange and build our ideas and concepts. Technology platforms hold that promise.

There is a real need for a new conceptual innovation framework

We need a better conceptual innovation framework, this innovation ecosystem one, to achieve this.

What is needed is something more radical and cohesive than we presently have. It moves from many “strands” of systems into one of building on one “single point of reference” that ecosystems achieve by being built and designed for a more cohesive set of innovation activities. It is knowledge-based and well-grounded.

The quest for knowledge

To achieve this evolution and allow innovation to thrive and work, organizations need to become better equipped in supporting knowledge, data, insights and people in their data handling, management, analysis sharing and processing.

This means we finally need to address controls and provide different structures and emphasis by re-orienting at faster learning rates on the reliance on the technical aspects. Having technology platforms as central to this becomes vital.

Building a collaborative environment requires digital technology as the platform.

The need for digital platforms and ecosystem designs has the growing potential to achieve this collaborative environment. The ability to evolve enterprise capabilities is evaluating value webs and artificial intelligence, pushing the need to reshape structures to be more outwardly facing, open to receiving new knowledge and prepared to share and exchange in return.

We are shifting critical capabilities that are growing the agility to trial, pilot and learn quickly as information flows in. We are achieving a faster adaptation and exploring mentality. Combining data and human knowledge reveals this collaborative potential and a new set of competitive opportunities. We are seeking collaboration and co-creation.

The increased ability to deploy, activate and utilize multiple organizations’ resources and assets requires these digital platforms to constantly exploit latent potential through the network and relationship engagements that engage in mutual pursuit.

Ecosystems and platforms become the core of any design.

“Ecosystems fundamentally challenge how we currently do things and rearrange how innovation is managed today. It cannot work through stand-alone systems or software components. It needs “digital platforms that offer the technical and organizational context so a community can interact for a shared purpose” (adapted from Yochai Benkler)

Ecosystem design relies increasingly on building networks and relationships of interconnected organizations organized around one or a few valuable focal points. These firms can contribute to a shared platform that offers both producers of value but constantly engages with user-side participants, helping to dynamically shape, offer and provide insights, understanding and a forum for criticism and discovery on what they see as valuable to them.

It is in this ecosystem design that organizations can act differently on strategies, business models, leadership commitment and encouragement, building out different capabilities to build collectively new value creation, breaking down previously complex or challenging problems by having in place capturing systems and organizational models that reflect a common ecosystem design thinking.

Seeing the result, achieving a more significant impact and contribution from our innovation activities

The result of designing and thinking innovation ecosystems needs to have a robust, dynamic and holistic approach in its dimensions; it has to be systematically designed and implemented, knowledge-driven by events and process design, and driven by dynamic interactions.

This call for a different result than what innovation offers today.

Achieving this innovation ecosystem thinking does require a profound shift in how innovation is viewed and approached in the business landscape today and in the future.

To solve the more complex challenges we face today, we need to build sustaining, lasting impact in what we offer in future. This needs this growing dependent type of complementary innovation that ecosystem design and thinking provides.