Making Sustainability central to our future innovation capability building will be through the adoption of taking on a new open ecosystem approach.
Broader collaborations will become central for future organizations to find ways to cooperate, network and build relationships, that recognize the partnership value, to achieve a sustainable, future business that offers impact and connected design for customers to value, that meets their changing needs.
Today’s challenge is to build the capacity to be different, to sustain and accelerate the critical aspect that innovation, ingenuity and creativity can provide, with the additional stimulus for sustaining lasting growth.
Our thinking needs to reflect a longer-term horizon, beyond just achieving immediate results. The dividend of thinking for a sustainable future has the promise of greater value and recognition. The reward by customers comes from the value of resolving growing complex problems, which is increasingly coming through this understanding of ecosystem design and collaborative endeavours.
We need to build far more collaborative environments for exchanging knowledge and sharing. To achieve this the recognition of the value of ecosystems as central to any future design is becoming central to this need, to co-create and capitalize on a wider knowledge only available in an open approach.
It is through continued open learning, that capabilities become stronger and more difficult for competitors to understand and imitate. Capabilities grow through use and application in increasingly intensified ways. Knowledge explored, offers new knowledge gained.
Ecosystem thinking is becoming central to our future as we open up to greater co-creation and collaborations opportunities. I believe co-creation spreads risk, accelerates ideas into higher-value solutions, and builds on diversity within the connections and relationship network.
Ecosystem thinking increases awareness and focuses in the dialogues and exchanges achieved within the network; these have the “combination effect” of greater potential to give impact and value in returns, attuned far more to customer needs or market trends. Building the capacity to innovate in more open, ecosystem ways strengthens the business pathway to a sustainable future.
Today the aim is to build distinctive capabilities that are more collaborative, receptive and open to a greater diversity of knowledge and opinion. The challenge within any collaborative design, there is the need to draw out the characteristics of each of the organizations participating in a collaborative ecosystem and find ways to harmonize and seek out synergies and that “greater” network effect of firms within an innovation ecosystem.
Attracting collaborators requires a greater investment at the front end to seek out those like-minded and driven into the search of finding greater value in collaborative frameworks. It is the early recognition that by combining growing diverse expertise, that cannot be replicated by others easily, and seeing the ‘higher’ motivation of exploring and spotting “first mover” advantage in the designs achieved. The investment in the front end of ecosystem design, in finding like-minded partners, becomes critical.
When you set out to build capability to be sustaining, you need to consider there are two types of capabilities, distinctive, which are the characteristics of the organization which others cannot replicate and reproductive, which can be bought in by the competition but always need to need to be appropriate to any objectives you are trying to achieve. Within a growing ecosystem recognizing those further distinctive and reproductive capabilities can only enhance the quest for finding new innovation possibilities.
Focusing on improving the capabilities of your people’s needs, has in my opinion, five essential elements that combined give a greater sustaining potential. It is by applying these through consistent application and measurement, that sustaining these within your activity, leads to a greater potential to increase innovation potential and then lead to the sustainable competitive advantage we all need to find.
Bringing together partners provide new competitive edges that the competition finds increasingly hard to replicate. It is through value creation that is increasingly built on a collaborative approach you achieve greater sustainability.
It is recognizing the shared common ground is through sustainability, it becomes the core of all we do to justify the increased investment and complexity to seek out new innovation ecosystem values.
A problematic journey of changes will be confronting us- Will sustainability make the case?
It is through recognition that we need to collaborate and co-create in new ecosystem designs. We need to extend the knowledge of one into the power of many.
Consumers recognise the world is entering different moments of extremes; weather, political hostage, economic concerns, in a planet that is in trouble from many aspects of health, wealth distribution, political tensions, migration flashpoints, and much more.
Shortages and rapidly rising prices are suddenly happening and certainly grabbing our attention. Today we are caught at a crossroads on currently expecting abundance and affordability versus accepting a sustainable one, where choice and prices will challenge our present acceptance of availability and convenience, in a rapidly depleting world of resources.
There is growing awareness and the recognition that this complexity needs a very different innovation thinking approach, a more collaborative one, found in ecosystem design.
Sustainable innovation needs to shift our thinking. Strengthening and invigorating innovation partnerships becomes key in our need to change.
The whole urgency of collaborating has grown and given the importance of managing through ecosystems and platforms where parties can manage and share. Developing the capabilities and competencies to address sustainability issues needs a new open, collaborative mindset. The push for establishing robust sustainability ecosystems will be relevant within the new core to manage the business differently.
The end result is bringing together many strands of thinking, into a ‘living and dynamically designed ecosystem’ that needs to evolve constantly over time. I wrote a very detailed explanation of adaptive systems in a post recognizing that innovation is a complex adaptive system.
Just take a look at the components of an innovation complex adaptive system compared and I think you will recognize and need to ‘account’ for much of these within any ecosystem design consideration.
The real value is becoming (more) adaptive in design and capability understanding, that fits your immediate and longer-term needs. Ones that build up a capacity that gives this flexible, versatile and malleable design; an evolving, living ecosystem that constantly adjusts to give a new sustaining future of seeking out in different places growth and future value creation impact.
Over time and experiences, you clarify and deepen your innovation proactive principles and capabilities, build-out ecosystem thinking and see co-creation as the new value and impact route and make this a constant “living and dynamic” touch and value map that has a sustainable value for your future.
Finally, embracing the world of intersections.
Sustainable value creation (the rationale for taking this journey) lies at the intersection of social and corporate value. That suggests that sustainability needs to be the new growth core; it embraces sustainability as a new direction of travel.
Embrace all the intersections, seek out the networks and relationships that will bring fresh insights, open up your thinking but also challenge so much of our present “closed down” thinking. This comes from adopting a clear innovation ecosystem design through a powerful arrangement of collaborators and partners that complement and leverage out concepts into new valuable solutions.
