Feeling trapped, break out of the box with Innovation Business Ecosystems
I have been investing a growing amount of time in building my understanding of Business Ecosystems and from one of my AI chats I really do get some wonderful “nuggets” of thinking.
It does continue to amaze me within a stream of exchanges or prompts how you are sparked into another strand of thinking that continues to build your understanding or simplify a part that can be complicated to explain.
One of these “popped up” while I was trying to relate Natural Ecosystems with Business Ecosystems and I asked a follow on a prompt around mind shifts “What are the principles of the mind shift to bring structure to recognizing different changes in thinking from existing business thinking to make the bridge into fresh thinking needed for Business Ecosystem thinking.”
I simply loved this reply as so clear and defined for changing thinking.
Eight principles for bridging traditional thinking into Ecosystem thinking
Interconnected Business Ecosystems- the imperative in a modern world
Background and Introduction
I enjoy the value of building different thoughts through Mind Mapping. They trigger as well as pull together different strands. In a world that seems to be facing a new world order in trade, collaboration and cooperation, we need building mechanisms that can adapt and give a better resilience in “selective” networks. For me, building and designing Business Ecosystems offers a different way of enabling growth, different value and worth.
So let me tell you the story of Business Ecosystems in a modern world
In today’s rapidly evolving world, the concept of ecosystems has emerged as a critical model for achieving sustainable growth and addressing complex challenges. Ecosystems, in this context, refer to networks of interconnected entities—whether they be businesses, communities, or technologies—working collaboratively to create value and drive innovation.
The imperative of ecosystems is becoming increasingly evident as we navigate a more interconnected world, where working together isn’t just beneficial, but essential.
We are in a world of re-calibrating our business, where to invest and who to partner with. Firstly we have to cut-away much of our existing approaches and thinking of how we organize and operate.
Opening our minds to the alternative of being in a collaborative network, sharing in value and worth.
Having a reliable network to plug into and exchange views in confidence and speedily is vitally important. Many of those advisors we relied upon for economic prediction, (banks, consultancies, think tanks, even prediction models) providing their advice was prevalent on stability. They are at present as much at sea deciphering future direction as the rest of us.
What you can revert too and draw in a better level of confidence and understanding comes from the value and worth of your own trusted network. Who we know, who we work with and trust is so valuable in these volatile times.
Driving Integrated Interconnected Business Ecosystems
The integrated interconnected business ecosystem is a framework that offers a pioneering approach, one that builds the mechanisms to unlock sustainable and connected growth. This approach to business ecosystems fosters continuous innovation and works towards lasting competitive advantage through its interconnected parts.
At its core this holistic framework harmonizes five independent layers- Innovation, Entrepreneurial, Business, Dynamic and Enterprise Ecosystems- creating a virtuous cycle of value creation, resilience, sustainability and adaptability.
By adopting this framework, your organization gains a comprehensive implementation to back your move towards Business Ecosystems in design and thinking
Building a new Interconnected Business Ecosystem Design
I have recently been reworking my views on Business Ecosystems in their thinking and design. They are recognizing a fundamental shift in how we approach problem-solving and value creation. We need to continue to urge businesses to move away from often isolated, linear models towards this thinking and design, forming around being interconnected, based on dynamic systems.
It is moving towards a collaborative, interconnected design that makes for a radically different mindset where complex relationships, where value co-creation and balancing both short-term and long-term become central for sustainability and protecting a viable future.
We do need to recognize Business is on a Burning Platform: Why Traditional Approaches Are Failing
Building Ecosystem Business Models for Mid-Sized Firms are so often under-looked in much of the literature we are referred too. We get caught in the bigger players, often provided by the large consultant companies, for our references- such as Alibaba, Salesforce, Amazon, Apple, Siemens, etc,.
How can Mid-sized Business Organizations set about to build out an Ecosystem Business Model using third party providers for platforms, communication technology, data analysis and use of Gen AI?
Are these as expensive as initially feared, can they work as effectively as those provided for the bigger players offering Ecosystem solutions? You need to build out a projection of possible budgets for costs in the first year and then annual ongoing ones. Ecosystem building often runs into sometimes hundred of millions of dollars but taking a really small step I (really) hesitate here, but $2.0m to $3.0m for the first year to eighteen months provides you your dedicated Ecosystem, and yearly $1m, including team costs BUT it so depends. It is where you take this, in recognizing its value, diversity to your business and worth, determines where you take this out.
So please take these numbers as only a starters point to get your levels of interest up or otherwise I recommend you don’t bother to read the rest of the post! Scaling, then the numbers rise fast but so can the accelerated returns!
This is only a brief guidance to get you to relate and see if the “ecosystem juices” are flowing. It is not comprehensive but it does go into a starting point of a Mid-sized firms starting point to Business Ecosystems. Even if I hear some readers mutter these numbers are crazily low you have a initial framework to build up into a project
I want to here address a number of questions any organization contemplating this building a ecosystem would need to go through. There are a good few more but lets limit this to a level where they can be absorbed and then I suggest to go further then come and ask me.
When we are conceptualizing organization structures and relationships in Ecosystem thinking and design we often begin by attempting to relate this to Natural Ecosystems. We often miss the connections, perhaps this might help
Traditional business frameworks often get caught in mechanistic metaphors but natural ecosystem perspectives need a fundamentally different mindset. Why?
+Recognizing no business exists in isolation but in growing complex webs of relationships and dependencies
+ We need greater adaptation over rigid planning, we need to think continuous evolution and response change
+ Today we need to recognize we gain increasing value and insights from emergent outcomes, where the dynamic interactions within the system are more impactful that top-down directives
+ We are recognizing system dynamics have cascading effects, often indirect consequences and diversity of networks need to be considered to build resilient systems
So we need to often re-frame through natural ecosystem lens.
I do, it seems, work a lot on integrating systems. So much of this work is specifically focused on advancing innovation in processes, design, and flows through applying Ecosystem thinking and design. So much of what we discover seems to always fall between gaps in how we organize this into a cohesive whole getting to a commercial conclusion.
There are many reasons, for example, it could be in the handover from one person to another or team to team, it could be the ignoring of aspects that seemed unimportant earlier on, ignored as a concept progresses and completely forgotten at the final stages, yet this insight or nugget of information held the key to unlocking a discovery moment. We seem bad at integrating our thinking or processes, hence my constant “quest” to find ways to bring things together for integrated thinking and designs.
This is why I focus on Ecosystems in thinking and design. The other day I picked up on something in my research I felt was important within Business Ecosystems thinking. It took a while to put this into the understanding that “really” seems to talk to me and I hope you
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Is the horizon the past or the future in innovation dynamism?
Innovation has entered its death spiral as many have known it.
I mean it, innovation is starved, bleeding from a lack of resources, finances and top leadership resolve. It is fighting nothing more than rearguard defense.
Forget linear processes, forget one company inventions, forget the reliance of all the internal parts of the organization to support you, especially if you are an outlier, separated from the core of the business, sitting in some remote part of the world searching for inspiration, you are operating in a time capsule of old innovation practices.
