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.
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
There needs to be a fundamental shift in how we manage innovation, which needs ecosystem thinking and design. Not only in thinking and design but in how we structure its architecture, one based on platforms, open apps, and a marketplace for selection appropriate for the innovation delivery intention. This needs to be in open, highly collaborative ecosystems.
We need a better conceptual framework to build, one based on knowledge-based intelligence and well-grounded, driven by dynamic and constant interactions, events and processes, so all involved can be engaged in building solutions that have fresh impact and value within the market space identified.
My mind map of the over-arching aims of a new innovation narrative is shown below.
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.
Much of business today is caught up in managing short-term change that is growing in complexity and challenges across the business world globally. There is growing leadership and employee fatigue in managing rolling crises and not being able to adequately focus on the longer term, have that space to renew and in enough time as ideally liked. Disruption has been a constant at all organisational levels to adapt and adjust to worldwide events totally out of that organization’s control.
Following the pandemic, it has been hard to regain consistency due to staffing discontinuities and displacements, sourcing of raw materials, especially from China, their intermittency in availability and the general disruption of world trade. The war in Ukraine has only added more short-term crises in switching fuels, sourcing difficulties, changing supply chain dynamics, and generally readjusting the business operations in Ukraine and Russia to highly constrained operations or the loss/withdrawal need required by sanctions.
So the challenges in the past year have been highly focused on supply chain disruptions, plugging gaps in technology solutions that can provide solutions that can offer higher flexible, agile and advanced planning and production environments. The continued needs to keep moving towards securing a more sustainable future that reflects the need to become carbon neutral; net zero has needed a far more agile and adaptive approach.
As well as encourages thinking that is building a more robust circular economy to offset the immediate shortages but builds out a waste reduction mentality and recycling approach.
Yet disruption is increasing; we are in a volatile world of constant change.
Thinking of innovation as an innovation ecosystem in design
We need to re-think innovation and provide a new level of innovation integration and optimization.
What we see increasingly is the need to change to a different thinking, one of what “innovation ecosystems.” can provide.
In designing these innovation ecosystems, we might have the potential answer to overcoming and giving innovation that chance to be more central to the core of the business. It might offer us the ability to connect much of the rich internal knowledge with that outside one, that other organizations and individuals can provide, in diversity, or thought or contribution.
I envisage an ecosystem of working upon like-minded goals and ambitions, by collaborating for delivering a new form of innovation value. Collaborating in ecosystem thinking and design I would suggest opens up significant potential and combinations, that provide added value and significant opportunity for improvement on the existing offerings.
Approaching innovation on a common, shared technology platform can significantly enhance the discovery, experimentation, exploring and exploiting diverse skills and expertise through to commercialization.
