Envision Energy in living, evolving communities that challenge conventional wisdom.

September 12, 2023Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Building Innovation Capability, Business Ecosystem Understanding, Energy Transition, Fresh thinking, Improve Collaboration & Communication, Integrated Innovation Thinking, Value Creation Dynamics, Value Designing

I wrote a mini-series of three posts to introduce a radical concept that envisions the energy transition as a living, evolving entity that bridges technology and nature, sparking profound shifts in how communities generate, consume, and perceive energy.

It aims to trigger innovation engagement and activation strategies to change the energy transition dynamics within a community setting, offering decentralized community energy.

It focuses on the community in a decentralized way for its energy. It challenges established norms and prompts a complete reimagining of our relationship with energy and the environment through innovation, creativity and ecosystem thinking and design.

Imagine transforming the energy transition into a holistic ecosystem of interconnected businesses, each contributing unique value to accelerate sustainable energy adoption.

The links to take you to the sites where you can read the proposed solution are at the bottom of this post.

Introducing the Energy Transition Nexus: A Living Energy Organism” that challenges the Conventional Approach to the Energy Transition

Where are the success stories of Ecosystem thinking in the Energy Transition?

September 5, 2023Posted inBusiness Ecosystem Understanding, Business Ecosystems, Energy Generation, Energy Networks, Innovation Ecosystems, Network & Collaborating Effects, Value Creation Dynamics, Value Designing

A range of success stories showcase the value of ecosystem thinking in different industries relating to the energy transition. These are important to emphasise as they recognize the importance of combining a mix of stakeholders, technologies and organizations in interconnected and interdependent ways.

Ask how we can leverage and use Ecosystem thinking and design to promote innovation within the Energy Transition, as it is a powerful approach to radical change. By fostering collaborations and synergies, you can accelerate the development and adoption of innovative solutions for the energy transition.

Before we look at examples of ecosystem thinking and designs applied, we should consider a step-by-step guide to use and apply ecosystem thinking and design applicable to the energy transition.

Fusing Human and Technology to Enable Innovation Ecosystems to Thrive

September 3, 2023Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, Business Platforms and Ecosystems, Customer Seamless Experiences, gaining innovation momentum, Improve Collaboration & Communication, Sustainability, Value Creation Dynamics, Value Designing

“Making something harmonious” often means we have to reconcile differences to balance out the tensions and issues to enable and make them compatible to work.

“Fusing” human engagement with technology enablement involves creating a harmonious integration of human collaboration and technological tools to enable an ecosystem’s successful development and operation. Is that possible?

How do we go about evaluating all the possible needs of customers, as they are mostly our success arbitrators? We must gain insights and refer through multiple information sources- digital data and direct human responses – than ever before; these insights are becoming essential to our businesses.

Calibrating the right way to use technology to create mutual benefit is an increasing theme across businesses, which means we need high levels of interdependence.

Find your Marketplaces; they can be the secret to your success.

September 1, 2023Posted inBusiness Ecosystem Understanding, Innovation Ecosystems, Marketplaces, Network & Collaborating Effects, Platforms, Value Creation Dynamics, Value Designing

The theory goes you identify an Ecosystem of like-minded businesses that share a common need to solve a vexing problem, challenge or concept. Then, one party sets up a platform or gains the agreement of one already available, a neutral platform, to use it. Hence, it has all the technology, governance and structure to enable the group to communicate, exchange and build the (emerging) solution to work and then have the structure for it to (rapidly) scale.

The marketplace, the third part, often gets left to last when those achieving this new solution realize it needs a place for actual exchange, a thriving buyer/seller market.

Today, we have witnessed a rapid expansion of the Marketplace on offer. Marketplaces are increasingly being stretched, and the boundaries of their understanding keep extending. We have moved from simply listing, though, to transactional marketplaces ( travel, delivery), full-stack marketplaces (on-demand services- Uber), Market Maker (for homes, cars, jobs) into eCommerce(fashion, groceries) and Direct-to-Consumer( food, banking, wellness, lifestyle and eyewear)

By participating at an Ecosystem level, you are putting clear skin in the game; the platform provider tends to drive the roadmap, provide the governance and often play the lead role. There are so many “neutral” platform providers that much of the technology and engineering solutions can be resolved by using established platforms that many of the tensions, when ecosystems are formed, can fall away, allowing those working on a challenge to focus specifically on that and spend their time breaking down the IP and the returns, building the new solution.

Yet it is the role of the Marketplace that determines increasingly the success. Just reflect on some of the most prominent marketplaces. You have Amazon, Alibaba, Airbnb, Salesforce, Booking, eBay, LinkedIn, etc.

Ecosystems for innovating for a sustainable future, back to basics

August 27, 2023Posted inBusiness Ecosystem Understanding, Business Ecosystems, Ecosystems, Innovation Ecosystems, Knowledge Ecosystems, Network Effects, Value Creation Dynamics, Value Designing

Sometimes, we need to go back to our original roots of thinking to remind ourselves and sometimes refresh the areas of focus we need to emphasise. Today, I focus increasingly on how innovation and ecosystem thinking and design need to combine in the Energy Transition.

I believe Ecosystems in design and thinking must form the future path to travel for innovation, collaborations, invention and growing cooperation. We need to think through more demanding challenges today that are highly complex and to do this with a higher degree of success in valuable outcomes. We need to open our thinking and minds and share knowledge to learn from each other.

A fundamental question to ask: “What do I need to consider for entering into an innovation ecosystem design?”

Focusing on the Learning Components of the Composable Innovation Framework

August 8, 2023Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, Business Platforms and Ecosystems, Fresh thinking, gaining innovation momentum, Improve Collaboration & Communication, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Value Creation Dynamics, Value Designing

Within the Composable Innovation Enterprise Framework lies the core, the different innovation stacks, and the learning components. Here, I want to briefly talk about the importance of the learning components that support the innovation design and especially the different innovation stacks.

The elements of the innovation stack are designed to support innovation’s core tasks, including learning, absorbing, assessing knowledge management, creativity, design, experimentation, and testing. By modularizing these tasks and their interfaces, organizations can assess their innovation progress by having a complete innovation system available to them, designed on specific stack elements to address knowledge operation requirements in the stage of development to commercialization.

The Innovation Stacks are ready to support different steps in the innovation engagement process

Additionally, with the upgrade in technology and platform approach, we can support the rapidly emerging human-AI collaboration needed for each building block and component and provide a step-by-step validation.

Yet it is the sequence of how we learn that becomes vital to “feed” and build the innovation stacks.

Reducing today’s Volatility with Innovation Ecosystem Thinking and Design

August 3, 2023Posted inBusiness Ecosystem Understanding, Business Ecosystems, Network & Collaborating Effects, Network Effects, Sustainability, Value Creation Dynamics, Value Designing
Innovation ecosystem thinking and design, our growing need

Much of business today is caught up in managing short-term change that is growing in complexity and challenges.

So the challenges in the past year have been highly focused on supply chain disruptions, plugging gaps in technology solutions that can provide a higher flexible, agile, and advanced planning and production environment and continue to keep moving towards securing a more sustainable future that reflects the need to become carbon neutral, net zero.

Yet disruption is increasing; we are in a volatile world of constant change.

Today’s systems are highly stretched and have been designed and built for a steady, repeating business, the era of yesterday. Flexibility, agility, and adaptability have yet to be addressed sufficiently in design or mind shifts for our present and future operations to provide a different, more agile operating environment. Consistently has been the norm, whereas today it reacts to constant change coming from multiple, often unpredictable situations.

We need to change how we operate.

The building out of the Composable Innovation Enterprise Framework.

August 1, 2023Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, amplifying the innovation signal, Building Innovation Capability, Business Ecosystem Understanding, Business Platforms and Ecosystems, Fresh thinking, Innovation Ecosystems, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation, Value Creation Dynamics, Value Designing

During May and June 2023, I worked through and concluded my thinking on why we needed to change our Innovation approach from far to often a linear one, and consider a new, more up-to-date, and dynamic solution for managing innovation, one that recognises the non-linear nature of so much of our undertakings today in innovation, from discovery to commercialisation.

I have called this the Composable Innovation Enterprise Framework– here is why and what went into this proposal that I feel should be adopted for managing innovation in the future.

As the investigation, validation, and viewpoints were built up over several posts, I felt summarising the series here gives you the appetite to delve into the posts themselves.

We need to shift our innovative thinking from static to dynamic.

We have been in very static, traditional approaches to innovation, very segmented and often insular, and as so often happens in innovation, it has complexities that seemingly grow and multiple changes, partly from what we discover in the development of new solutions but partly from far more rapid changes in the business landscape and our current innovation process often breaks down and limits the ability to manage this across the whole development to delivery lifecycle.

We need systems and processes that are flexible, adaptable, and can enable continuous improvements but are fully connected, transparent, and integrated across the entire business. We need to approach innovation differently through connected agility, have speed and automation more central, and provide roles for a great diverse set of participants.

A system that encourages forming strategic alliances, partnerships, and knowledge sharing to drive innovation and create shared value in open, thoughtful, and collaborative ways. This is where technology enables these connections and triggers different thinking in the quest for moving toward more extraordinary valuable solutions—the “connected” value of behaviours thinking ecosystems and operating on collaborative platforms.

The benefits of participating in cross-sector innovation ecosystems

July 19, 2023Posted inBusiness Ecosystem Understanding, cross-sector collaborations, Ecosystems, Innovation Ecosystems, Knowledge Ecosystems, Network & Collaborating Effects, Value Creation Dynamics, Value Designing
The Benefits of Participating in Cross-Sector Innovation ecosystems

I can remember getting completely “hooked” on Business Ecosystems by a series from Deliottes and one specific report, introduced and coordinated by Eamonn Kelley, with many contributors including Kelly Machese, Anna Muoio, John Hagel, and Larry Keeley. It was called “Business ecosystems come of age” and maybe it did not change my life, but it gave it a clearer focus- innovation ecosystems. Take a read, it is well worth it, its value then, 2015 has only matured in my mind.

I was also looking at another great piece by Deloitte on tapping into the Silicon Valley innovation ecosystem under a report called “How to Innovate the Silicon Valley Way” that came out in 2016. Another great motivation for focusing on innovation ecosystems.

One question asked in the Silicon Valley piece was “Why should enterprises give up transactional approaches in favor of dynamic, ecosystem-led innovation?

Today I would reverse that question “Why would any company still be locked into transactional approaches only functioning on its own resources?”

Today the struggle is to deal with increasing complexity, undoing the “knot” of difficult challenges and these cannot be undone or solved without collaborations outside one organization’s walls. We need to push this even further and totally accept that the hardest but best collaborations come from being involved in cross-industry or sector innovation systems.