Network & Collaborating Effects - Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence

Disruption is the new constant; forget the Status Quo

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.

Dealing with growing complexity needs innovation ecosystem thinking and design

earth globe with googly eyes on gray background — *Photo by Anna Shvets on Pexels.com*

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.

Why Innovation Ecosystems?

*Reaching out for a new design built on collaborative building blocks of design*

Following on from a series of posts on innovation ecosystems, especially a recent one, “Seeing innovation differently through ecosystem thinking and design” I outlined a need for a profound shift in the business landscape; well in my view, that time is rapidly approaching.

Why do we need to make a really necessary change?

Our present economic models, certainly in the West are so heavily debt-laden, from the effects of over-spending, supporting the Ukrainian war, and the Corvid crisis, and rightly supporting those in economic need and business difficulties.

One of the problems in economic distribution is that applying this in a top-down way is it can often not determine those in need from those who simply gain or are unable to deliver to those the adequate or appropriate support they require.

Our models of economic distribution are simply outdated or built on self-interest or self-promotion or simply enabling preservation for individual benefit and not for the ‘greater’ community.

The next few years are going to be very painful in further adjustments and polarization.

Our politicians continue the hackneyed phrase or idea, said or used so often that it has become boring and has no meaning, of the need for growth and prosperity.

I cannot see this way forward if we remain “locked” in the existing systems of self-interest, benefits being given to selected groups as rewards for support or simply to maintain the status quo.

Exploring points of value in adopting Business Platforms.

Business Platforms provide the backbone of the Network.

Today we are still caught up in the validation and relevance of managing a business through platform thinking by making the business case of its value and impact. We should not be; it is time for you to hop onto the train.

The ability to present a compelling business case for the use and application of platforms is overwhelming. I think I have well over 100 plus arguments for their use, value, impact and application.

For me, platforms are needed as we face a very different economic landscape.

We need to choose where to focus in the future, where to concentrate our resources and attempt to bridge the fragmentation that is occurring. The world of collaboration, where we can find partners to share and reinforce what we do, is leading to new dynamics of combining.

Platforms are more viable and relevant.

Platforms allow you the opportunity to innovate in very different ways. They can add value through collaborations that can add more to the internal efficiency options through learning and sharing. Platforms help manage the difficulties of transitions we are all undergoing and change how we see the world through a broader collaborative set of lenses. Continue reading “Exploring points of value in adopting Business Platforms.”