I am introducing the Hierarchy of Ecosystem Needs in a series of posts. This is the fourth post within the series introducing the second layer- the Business Ecosystem.

As I have previously mentioned, the design of this Hierarchy of Ecosystems is modular; each Ecosystem can stand alone and offer significant value, but it is part of a more extensive cohesive system where each layer contributes to the overall success of collaborative ecosystems.

The holistic perspective is covered in the opening and closing posts within the series.

This interconnected story attempts to convey the power of transformation; each layer’s structure and unique propositions give a dynamic and resilient ecosystem set that aims to drive collective prosperity and sustain excellence.

Introducing the essential components of the Business Ecosystem

The Business Ecosystem within the Hierarchy of Ecosystems

In exploring the Business Ecosystem, we ascend to the second layer, Business Synergy and its Orchestration – Interconnected Solutions and Cooperative Strategies.

Here, we need a high level of orchestration and strategic harmony.

The business ecosystem takes centre stage through interconnected solutions as businesses collaborate for innovation and strategic cooperation.

Let’s unravel this layer’s significance, unique characteristics, and dynamic components.

1. Business Synergy – Interconnected Solutions and Cooperative Strategies: Strategic Harmony in Collaborative Ventures

At this phase, the focus shifts beyond mere collaboration; it zooms in on strategic cooperation and interconnected solutions. This move amplifies the impact of collaborative efforts, driving businesses toward shared goals and mutually beneficial strategies.

Significance: Moving beyond collaboration, this phase focuses on strategic cooperation and interconnected solutions, amplifying the impact of collaborative efforts.

Challenges: Aligning diverse strategies, ensuring fair value distribution, and addressing potential conflicts of interest are challenges during strategic cooperation.

Business Ecosystems: Driving Economic Growth

Purpose: Achieve sustainable growth and competitive advantage.

Functions to consider:

• Supply Chain Integration: Collaborate with suppliers for efficiency.
• Market Expansion: Leverage partnerships for market reach.
• Competitive Intelligence: Stay informed about industry trends and competitors.

Design Considerations:

• Interconnected Networks: Integration with key partners in the value chain.
• Strategic Alliances: Form alliances that enhance overall competitiveness.
• Data Sharing Protocols: Establish secure protocols for sharing critical business information.

Outcome: Market Leadership: Increased market share and competitiveness.

2. Business Ecosystems: Driving Economic Growth

Purpose: Achieve sustainable growth and competitiveness.

Essential Elements:

1. Strategic Partnerships:
   • Collaborative alliances enhance overall competitiveness.
   • Establishing a network for economic growth and market presence.
2. Integrated Supply Chains:
   • Seamless collaboration with suppliers for operational efficiency.
   • Building economic scale through integrated processes.
3. Market Intelligence:
   • Mechanisms for staying informed about industry trends and competitors.
   • Strategic decision-making for economic expansion and market leadership.

Outcome: Economic Expansion: Increased market share, profitability, and business resilience.

3. Connective Layer – Interconnected Solutions:

Focus: Building interconnected solutions that address challenges collectively.

Objective: Ensure that innovations and solutions are not isolated but contribute to a larger, interconnected system.

Dynamic Component: Enable the seamless integration of new solutions into the ecosystem.

Application: Implement agile development methodologies, allowing for the rapid integration of innovative solutions into the collaborative framework.

4. Strategic Layer – Cooperative Strategies:

Focus: Developing cooperative strategies that align the interests of multiple entities.

Objective: Formulate strategies that leverage collective strengths and resources for mutual benefit.

Dynamic Component: Regularly review and adapt cooperative strategies based on changing circumstances.

Application: Establish a dynamic governance model that allows for the continuous refinement of cooperative strategies as the collaborative ecosystem evolves.

The critical aspects of Governance Focus

• Develop governance frameworks for managing interconnected solutions, emphasizing fair distribution of benefits and responsibilities.
• Establish guidelines for cooperative strategy development, ensuring that strategic decisions align with the collective goals of the ecosystem.
• Implement security measures to protect sensitive information exchanged within the collaborative framework.

This layer contributes directly to economic growth, and its interconnectedness theme builds on the innovations generated in the foundational layer, fostering growth and mutual benefit.

As we delve deeper into the Business Ecosystem, this layer gains significantly from the Innovation Ecosystem layer and sets the stage for the next, the Dynamic Ecosystem layer, paving the way eventually to the top layer, the Enterprise Ecosystem, for transformational leadership and sustained excellence.

In summary, as the second layer, the Business Ecosystem is all about strategic harmony, where businesses orchestrate their excellence through interconnected solutions and cooperative strategies.

The post Achieving Synergy and Orchestration in the Business Ecosystem of the Hierarchy of Ecosystem Needs first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I want to relate adoption back to business platforms and anchor it in the process.

Today business platform adoption is a struggle. It needs a clear revisiting of the theory of diffusion and adoption to extract the relevant points of necessary practice.

What is vitally needed is the recognition that deciding on adopting a business platform approach has five stages or decision points to go through.

So often, platform providers automatically go to the assumption that their platform will be adopted. It simply will not without working through and gaining confirmation the five stages of adoption are clarified.

The five stages for business platform adoption decision.

Each of these needs a definitive engagement process by the business platform provider. Passing through the five stages of adoption needs relevance, identification and building out the relationship to pass through all these as distinct cascading steps.

Awareness and Knowledge – refer to a customer’s acknowledgement of the presence or existence of the new business platform and where they form a general perception of what it might entail. The intersection of need recognition often drives it through consistent education and marketing communications to show client value, not the platform provider’s prowess. This is the point of being inspired to find out more.

Persuasion and Interest – this occurs when a client processes the available information associated with the platform and considers the product or service’s appeal on this and its relevant value or potential to them Here, the client actively seeks out information and details and begins engagement. The critical point for any platform provider to manage well.

Decision and Assessment – Considering the persuasion factors, the client will decide whether to adopt, delay any decision, or reject the platform. Their activity in seeking advice, gathering data and comparing or making different assessments happen clearly here and need the contacted platform provider to understand the level of assessment and the issues. Here, costs begin to kick in, considering the switching costs and fresh investment needs and weighing the advantages. This is the hardest stage to understand. The ability to build a solid business case at this point is essential. My recent post, “Exploring points of value in adopting business platforms,” has some relevancy here.

Implementation and Exploration – These are the series of activities to put the platform to use in exploring its (multiple) points of value and validating these. The client employs the platform to a varying learning degree. The usefulness, impacts, and costs are determined, and they may search for further support or relevance value about it. Here the business platform provider needs to be really “on the case” in strengthening the engagement and anchoring it into more of a forward-looking partnership but working in parallel on this learning path, as adoption is a gradual journey.

Confirmation and Adoption– is mostly concerned with post-adoption behaviour exhibited by the adopter, reinforced by the platform’s actual delivery against the relative advantage ‘claims,’ its complexity and compatibility on their understandings. The individual finalizes their decision to continue using it and makes that ultimate investment in forming an ongoing, long-term partnership for extending its use to its full potential.

Develop this five stages  process of engagement in any adoption of business platforms

Suppose these five stages are not followed in the business platform adoption process; there is a higher probability of poor engagement, lost time in chasing leads, being distracted, and not getting the end result intended or stated or being the offering of compelling value believed as the stages of adoption were not followed and anchored in these transition points of understanding.

So I would always recommend understanding the theory of diffusion and adoption offered by Everitt Rogers in his Diffusion and Adoption theories for innovation ; it is as relevant for Business Platform adoption today as when he offered this for “straightforward” innovation.

Platforms are the new meeting place for innovation to happen. They diffuse and adopt as their key value but getting clients to think this through needs these five decision stages

The post The difficulties of adoption for the business platform first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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.

We are all being forced to make new Strategic Choices

As we look at where platforms fit within our business, we make strategic choices- are we looking for performance improvements, leveraging greater growth, tapping into a more distributed innovation capability or simply shaping new value strategies?

Today platforms are a key essential layer of infrastructure that scales participation differently.

They provide different options to improve performance and grow a new footprint in markets, products, and collaborations. Platforms can leverage assets and external capabilities you do not need to own or build; they provide fresh options to innovate, capture different and new value in insights and diversity of thinking, and allow for a higher pursuit of learning advantage.

We must consider the value of the combined effect of ecosystems, platforms, marketplaces and portfolios.

We can explore and exploit so much platform potential that fits with each individual company’s needs.

There are so many key questions to ask, to seek clarity too and how they can be positioned to reduce barriers to entry, commercialization and learning.

As we live in an unevenly distributed world, platforms can provide a better levelling effect, enable a way to thrive in a connected world and help offset eroding barriers we are all facing.

Let’s take FIVE underappreciated value points of business platforms.

1. Platforms are the new operation glue between end users, business developers, institutions, and manufacturing points. The ability to deploy digital software on machines enables the connecting, exchanging and talking to each other and managing a very different supply chain. Platforms are becoming the essential key layering point of infrastructure and operational management to orchestrate this through. They build out different assets, leverage the existing and optimise the potential within the existing ones to deliver a highly connected world to operate and manage within.

2. Platforms allow you to explore and experiment. Through the power of digitalization, you can re-imagine, capture, share and build from your imagination through a virtual world into the real world of realization. You have through platforms the process of honing discovery and collaboration, validating and extracting different designs, concepts or improvements on what you have

3 . Today, everything we build needs to be constantly reshaped, built upon in added ways, reshaped again and continually challenged and changed. We are in the world of circular design, and platforms rapidly become the exchange point for informing and transforming. Platforms are becoming the new flow centres that allow constant motion and offer disproportional potential, where numerous small moves can and do offer big things. It is how you influence this new set of connected dynamics that will determine

4. Platforms are the mechanism to resolve scale, broaden out the scope and enable a higher speed.  Collaboration and networks working through good business platforms can reduce barriers to entry by achieving access to technology advancements, having accessible tools and added infrastructure and enabling a more liberalization of one entity’s constraints in access to resources, learning and gaining from others.  In having available different financing options, scaling through 3rd parties and new avenues to talent and customers, different communities and sharing different and new practices all have a real combination effect.

5. Growing your business through Asymmetric Business thinking. What is your core? What will grow it in highly complementary ways? How can you cross traditional industries by leveraging what you have, combining it with technology and offering a higher value of what your core asset provides? Here we are dealing with the economics of compliments that depend on or require using another product.

So, where does Asymmetric thinking gain by being applied through platform thinking? Platforms provide you with new business model options.

Let me expand on this further as the Asymmetric Business Model opportunity requires a platform approach.

Google and Facebook are attention-based models that discover feed and generate the revenue that business pays through their portfolio of Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Facebook. Google has a search engine for users to find anything, and businesses and publishers gain keywords to build their content around. If you take the creation of software app development drives the demand for core products, home printers depend on ink cartridges, so they each can complement and reinforce.

The economics of compliments you find on a platform will allow you to diversify, connect and grow your business.  A digital platform offers software applications, access to sophisticated tools, technology, expertise, and learning. It builds out (your) functionality and brings different levels of flexibility that can sit on top of what you have already achieved.

I have taken five different aspects of platforms here.

The combination effect of what a business platform can achieve for you is actually endless in its applications. As I mentioned earlier, I think I have well over 100 plus arguments for their use, value, impact, combination and application that can be explored, adapted and combined.

Platforms provide you with new business model options that allow you to move across different industrial sectors that were not possible without all the economics of complementaries.

Ecosystems and Platforms are the new collaborative business need.

By applying different platform business thinking, you can consider commoditising different aspects of your business value to strengthen your core assets in new value-added ways. Most importantly, you have the (equal) chance of bundling complementaries with your core from software and digital offerings and combining AI & Human intelligence to effectively compete and differentiate yourself with leverage that gives added value to your customers..

For instance, you can own and control less but share and partner more as you shift from a given asset into a collective intelligent one, leveraging all the essential parts that having access to a technology platform can provide.

Platforms are about organizing and resolving complex structures, they offer a new network business model that needs to be deployed to meet a new economic landscape. They can be a fundamental building block to finding new ways of business value creation, offering that base to a new model of collaboration and competition.

I have outlined a case for change in a recent article, “thinking out the evolution of platforms and ecosystems.” if you have the opportunity and time

I would argue platforms are your future business journey.

They are highly relevant for growth and diversification and offer a sustainable pathway. You build more dynamic capabilities to sense and seize opportunities quicker in your highly connected world.

The post Exploring points of value in adopting Business Platforms. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.