Ecosystems and Platforms are our pathways to our innovating future
Ecosystems have suddenly become of age. They can be formed around common concepts fairly rapidly, they can enable cross-cutting innovation to be delivered in highly collaborative ways.
They can, through shared platforms, achieve a closer relationship with the customer, to understand their needs and experience through increased collaboration, and engagement.
Connecting and collaborating opportunities for business seem to be powerful networks of value-adding effect, for finding new economic opportunity. This calls for some radical rethinking of the existing business and deciding the design of the future business.
This calls for thinking through a different designed structure for the business and different skills needed. The shifting from the current state to the future designed state is no easy task. It requires a radical redesign of the organization, as it significantly increases complexity and where any digital transformation has to center upon as the critical enabler to enable this shift.
We are witnessing a very radical change in building a new business
With change driven by technology, increasingly disrupting and breaking down the past traditional boundaries and market positions of many incumbent organizations. Mostly these were built to defend positions to achieve and maintain economic scale. There is a new economic logic to build even greater scale through technology design, it involves greater complexity, yet its value proposition is to strive towards offering greater customer experience and satisfaction.
The solutions are valued far higher, in social and economic value. We need to recognize this is a new business model design with the arrival of engagement platforms that connect all the ecosystem of partners in its design, to gain this scale and value.
A new economic logic is emerging
A new economic logic that gets closer to the connected customer expectations and daily needs for innovative solutions to solve, in ways far better than that is being presently being offered. Connecting technology, digital and human understanding brings radically different solutions. A different innovative design has become paramount to these new offerings so they can be capitalized upon, releasing this increased value creation understanding of opportunities.
The market dynamics are also changing
we are seeing greater disruption and blurring of traditional boundaries of competition, yet the reality is that innovation systems, structures, and processes are badly lagging, in design and approach, to react and respond to this new dynamic. A dynamic where the start-up can undermine the established incumbent, mostly large organizations that are less nimble and agile, in radically different and dramatic ways, in short time frames, from a pilot, testing to scaling those solutions, moving them from local to global through the power of technology applications.
Identifying the critical capabilities becomes vital
It is identifying the critical capabilities and being adept and agile enough in learning from these, to embed them into the changing culture. There is a critical need to be technology savvy, digitally adroit, highly analytical and fast to make the connections, to explore and exploit the ‘breaking’ opportunities. We are having to adjust our learning to have increased levels of higher human-centered approaches, through exploiting design thinking, to learn and adapt.
Each of us has a part to play in how we redesign our thinking around innovation.
It is the sum of all the emerging parts that will build the new design. What is essential is to challenge much of the existing and replace it. We have this constant need to “refresh, rebuild and redesign” many of those innovation parts to keep turning theory learned through experimentation into practice gained from emerging practices that are leading edge.
We do not consider all the variables that came together for that one particular winning outcome. Often this does not work on a repetitive basis as the variables that make up each innovation can be so different, they are unique for each innovation event or activity. Yet we can learn from a growing ‘range of’ differentiating capabilities but it is this need to be more adaptive, fluid and being adept each time, change the innovation system we know today. One that is designed for the uniqueness of each opportunity.
We need to radically alter our thinking and redesign innovation.
It is not predictable, it is based on being inherently unpredictable and we have to design our innovation systems and structures for this. Constantly adapting, agile and highly responsive to new knowledge and insights flowing in, in greater dynamic ways.
Suggesting a new integrated innovation engagement system
We have this compelling need to have a new cycle of innovative design. A more integrated solution that takes our understanding of innovation and how to manage it, into the realms of ecosystems and platforms in its design and thinking.
I have suggested this as a concept that enables innovation to form in ecosystems based on platform solutions. I outline a new integrated innovation engagement system. If you are interested, take a read:
