Thinking Partner Ecosystems in design and delivery. There is a need to resolve immediate, mid-term, and long-term issues to show progressive thinking on how to grow collaboratively. How to collaborate to deliver impact, and create value when building your thinking in products, services, or new business models on any Partner Ecosystem design and thinking. One methodology stands out for me: the three-horizon framework

Partner ecosystems are highly valuable for delivering on these ambitions. Partner Ecosystems enable you to go beyond addressing immediate and surface-level issues to tackle deeper, systemic challenges and position clients at the forefront of collaborative and co-creative approaches.

In my view, this requires a progressive mindset that considers growth, impact, and value across various time horizons. This mindset lends itself really well to applying the three-horizon methodology.

The concept of three-horizon modelling, which considers short-term resolutions, mid-term growth, and long-term impact and value creation, is particularly relevant in this context.

Immediate Needs / Short-Term Resolutions (Horizon 1):

• Partner ecosystems should address immediate challenges and resolve pressing issues, such as supply chain disruptions, resource shortages, or regulatory changes and compliance.

• However, these short-term solutions should be designed with a broader vision in mind, laying the foundation for more sustainable and scalable approaches in the future.

• The searching for underlying root causes or systemic issues that need to be recognized and addressed later as partner ecosystems can develop short-term solutions that address the immediate problem and lay the foundation for more sustainable and long-term solutions.

• Collaborations within the ecosystem should prioritize knowledge sharing and data transparency, enabling a deeper understanding of the power of openly collaborating and sharing insights,

Mid-term Strategies / Growth (Horizon 2):

• Partner ecosystems should focus on mid-term strategies that enable growth, innovation, and competitive advantage. This involves co-creating new products, services, or business models that leverage the collective expertise and resources of the ecosystem partners.
• Building on the insights from short-term collaborations, partner ecosystems should drive growth and innovation by co-creating new products, services, or business models that significantly increase competitive advantage.
• By extracting and exploiting ecosystem partners’ collective expertise, resources, and diverse perspectives to anticipate and respond to evolving market trends, customer needs, and technological advancements more effectively.
• Mid-term strategies should also consider the potential impact on various stakeholders, including employees, communities, and the environment, ensuring responsible and sustainable growth.

Long-term Vision, Impact and New Value Creation (Horizon 3):

• Partner ecosystems should develop a long-term vision that transcends immediate commercial interests and addresses broader societal and environmental challenges, often contributing to underlying causes.

• Initiatives on this horizon should focus on broader areas of concern and contribution to solving, such as climate change mitigation, social equality, public health, and sustainable development, ultimately contributing to preserving human life and well-being. This involves collaborating with diverse stakeholders, such as academia, government agencies, non-profit organizations, and local communities, to co-create solutions that have a lasting positive impact.

• By co-creating solutions with a positive and lasting impact, partner ecosystems can position themselves as leaders in their respective industries and contribute to creating a better future for all.

Recognize we need to “cut through” different issues over different time horizons

• To truly “cut through the issues” and position clients ahead in their thinking, partner ecosystems must embrace a holistic and progressive approach that addresses immediate needs while simultaneously working towards mid-term strategies and a long-term vision. This requires open communication, trust, and a shared commitment to collaboration and co-creation among all partners.

• By fostering an ecosystem that values growth, impact, and value across different time horizons, organizations can address current challenges, shape the future of their industries, and contribute to a more sustainable and equitable world.

The value of the three-horizon approach

By adopting a three-horizon approach, partner ecosystems can simultaneously address immediate needs, drive growth and innovation, and create lasting impact and value. This progressive mindset requires a holistic understanding of the interconnectedness of challenges, a commitment to continuous learning and adaptation, and a shared sense of purpose among all ecosystem partners.

This approach recognizes that tackling systemic challenges requires a long-term perspective and a willingness to embrace complexity. It acknowledges that short-term solutions alone are insufficient and that true transformation necessitates a multi-faceted approach considering various time horizons and stakeholder needs.

The power of this Partner Ecosystem approach is that you recognize that in each time horizon, it considers growth, impact, and value across partner thinking and contributions. It breaks down complexity from the diversity of opinions and ideas. The recognition of cause, effect, and systemic issues catalyze the thinking. They provide this collaborative effect, bringing collective intelligence.

Your time to act is now- why not?

If you are curious to find out more, then let’s make the initial contact.

I have entered into a collaborative partnership with SIA Partners on Partner Ecosystems. Combining expertise, connections, methodologies, capabilities, and client work in advising, mentoring, and consulting is exciting; in offering some genuinely unique IP methodology in concept designs, research, and industry and institution connections, a compelling service offering is emerging. We believe the diversity within the proven application and combined strengths offer much.

The time to engage to discuss what this might mean to different businesses, institutions, and societies requires radically new thinking. Partner Ecosystems can solve complex issues, make a real difference in enhancing lives, and, in many cases, save lives through collaborative efforts.

Why not contact SIA Partners or myself to have an opening discussion? Where we, as your forward-thinking partner, are capable of helping you navigate the intricacies of today’s landscape and being your catalyst for the future in driving transformative change through greater collaboration and co-creation.  

Together, we can explore the challenges and possible scenarios that would help you move rapidly forward on your partner ecosystem journey, resolve your challenges and advance your future role in society and the values and impact of what you can offer.

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The Three Horizon Methodology is discussed extensively here

The post The value of applying the Three Horizons to Partner Ecosystem thinking. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I named my company Agility Innovation Specialists and at its core, we state that the value of this focus can offer a real “intensity in innovation” that we believe reflects today’s world of need.

We encourage you to disrupt the accepted, to constantly challenge the current ways and push into uncomfortable territory. We suggest you seek out customers’ unmet needs, and unexplored opportunities to give a new diversity to any thinking, and then we set about accelerating these ideas to fruition. Those all need abundant and constant agility.

Many of our business organizations continue to struggle with innovation and how to make it repeatable, sustaining and transformational. Often, it seems, the more large organizations attempt to become ‘agile’ the more they seem to achieve the very opposite, of rigidity.

Finding solutions to building agility is part of the necessary answer to achieving greater innovation solutions.

Our aim is to strengthen the core by building in increasing ‘waves’ of agility within your business and enabling a stronger set of sustaining innovation outcomes.

This comes over time, from this need to have agility, flexibility, and an open enquiring mind that looks to experiment and explore, making for an agile innovator this needs diffusion across the entire organization and that does take time.

I’m always looking to explore agility and recently came across the concept of “collective agility”

Then we have collective agility

I have been reading a good academic paper recently, one that I came across in my Big Data and Cloud research I have been undertaking. The paper is called “Collective Agility, Paradox and Organisational Improvisation” by Yingqin Zheng, Will Venters and Tony Cornford found on the London School of Economics site, under the department of Management.

Their point gained from studying GridPP and its part in the Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid (LHC) where they observed a collective, agile and distributed performance rather than seeing ‘agility’ as small-group and deliberate systems development practices often associated with ‘agile’.

It got me curious. Here is my summary of their paper.

It certainly offers some pointers to managing in more agile ways in a complex and often disparate organization.

Collective agility is focused on the same objective: shared.
In terms of business, it means the mission is shared by all and this mobilizes each person in ways that I feel are trying agility to innovation in new ways, well for me anyway.

It is providing an environment where “unintended consequences” emerge, many positive, others less so, where random thoughts and ideas collide and through these exchanges within the community they form a “collective mindfulness” to solve these complex challenges.

Collective agility seems to require a loose coupling, not heavy structures or rules, encouraging a culture of improvisation and constant ‘tinkering’ that comes from not just intelligence, trust and pragmatism but from the knowledge that lies within the community.

Collective agility needs to have minimal structure, flexible planning, extensive communication and social bonding, all working towards this coherent, facilitated and growing feeling of making good sense (sense-making) through this coordinated but distributed network.

It is totally reliant on the interactions and attention to coordination to achieve this ‘collective mindfulness’

The big “ah-huh” for me

Collective agility is about accepting what is unpredictable and uncontrollable yet working within given boundaries, actively working upon seeking out improving performance and capability, to still perform in these circumstances of uncertainty.

Now for me, many organizations are grappling with uncertainty, volatility and unpredictable situations and resort to trying to master them in rigorous, highly disciplined ways.

This collective agility is suggesting we go the other way, we let go, hang loose but stay collectively focused by just reacting in agile ways. Does that raise some different thinking for you, it does for me.

We are seeking out improved performance but in really agile ways across a distributed community or network. Large organizations today are regretfully still tackling thorny problems in ‘given silo’s’ and this ‘collective agility’ thinking might open up our ideas about collaborating and co-creating in different ways.

It is in the combining of performances, that tackle issues in improvised ways but within a trusted and pragmatic way. It creative productive tensions, dynamics and motivating challenges and the group feel that ‘capacity for action’, motivated to combine, share and explore together to solve the problem.

Rules, structures and organized events often inhibit and feel contrived, the idea behind ‘collective agility’ is it is more natural even within the organization with established routines and strong cultures as they can bind, provide collective strength, as well as inhibit. It is seeking out the minimal structures, releasing the flexibility and bonding that can come from these routines and stronger cultures.

The when what, who, where and how collective agility is performed

According to the authors, agility can be learnt through ‘learned improvisation’ where some established tools are dropped or removed and some ‘surprise, risk and wonder’ are allowed into the exchanges.

The atmosphere of experimentation, trust, shared goals and emotional bonds provide for confidence to grow, in sharing and learning from made mistakes, as it contributes to the ‘higher’ cause of what the community is tackling within these tough problems.

The group grows in its ‘sense of pride in working and searching for a higher cause and is even willing to undertake unpopular tasks to move exchanges along. The motivation grows through this collective agility.

We often recognize improvisation and agility are more easily performed in small groups, jazz improvisation is often used to relate to this agility. The key is often the ambience and this can equally come from building out bigger communities to perform and exchange (notes)

The final thought is agility requires a mental attitude “to let go of control” to interact, to improvise but to seek to keep that sense of cohesiveness of constantly wanting to work things out, working consciously to keep moving forward towards the higher task.

Art and science fuse.

The authors suggest science becomes more like an art- visionary, experiential, passionate, agile and emergent. I’ve written about art and science before, see here “Renaissance comes from combining art and science for innovation“, so I can relate to this need to bring these two often separate practices into one again.

As I was working through this paper, replaying the conceptualization of ‘collective agility’, I liked the comment within the paper “agility for us is an expression of what people do or achieve, rather than what they might do or capabilities they hold”

Then another important part of this paper is managing the Paradoxes
They also bring out Paradoxes and provide a helpful table of these seemingly conflicting ideas or paradoxes to build ‘collective agility’ in understanding. These are based on:

1) The paradoxes of learning: “as we struggle between the comfort of the past and the uncertainty of the future which are fundamental to the process of innovation, transformation and sense-making”. Learned improvisation and reflective spontaneity.

2) The paradoxes of organising: “reflecting tensions between control and flexibility, formal and informal, integrated and differentiation denoting an ongoing process of striving for an equilibrium of often opposing forces”. Planned agility and structured chaos.

3) The paradoxes of belonging: “we strive for both self-expression and collective affiliation”…but also being “self-driven, intelligent and creative people, yet they also have an acute appreciation that success relies on collaborative effort”. Collective individuality and anxious confidence.

They finish the paper by offering useful tables highlighting some key organizational practices that help to make this collective agility work through these paradoxes.

We are constantly searching for agility to perform innovation

Agility is linked to change. Change is constantly throwing obstacles in our way. We are urged to be nimble, to react quickly, and to tackle challenges in new ways. Developing agility allows us to be in a constant ‘state’ of recognizing nothing is seemingly staying the same.

If we are feeling those around us, are all working towards the same goals, then we feel less inhibited, we may not like change but we gradually accept it. If others are reinforcing the necessary change through this ‘collective agility’ it can become a source of new hope, new discoveries, and a place for opportunity, with real excitement, full of possibilities

Gaining that critical sense of collective identity missing from many in our organizations.

By knowing “we” are collectively all working towards the same purpose, constantly having the progress mutually reinforced, allowing for clear debate but being pushed and moving forward, being allowed to freely exchange within a common purpose in ‘collective’ ways, then we are certainly are moving towards a more fluid, organizational agility.

This collective agility might alter the ways we can tackle tough problems and work in volatile environments, which then can yield in collaborative ways, solutions that are more radical and breakthroughs in innovation, something we should all be striving to achieve.

Certainly, this does offer some interesting thoughts to take collaboration and co-creation further through this collective agility concept of greater improvising.
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The post Building Collective Agility for Innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

We need to push them a lot harder. We need to move away from business-only innovation into a society based.

The shifts taking place

Society has shifted, is shifting; the consumer is becoming the supplier of content, meaning, of their taste preferences, their emotions and the goods and services they will buy. Mass consumption, the model honed in the 20^th century doesn’t work anymore.

Customers are actually saying “less choice, more say” and seeking deeper self-determination. This personalising of preference can seem more complex for organizations but there are many ways to manage this it requires real change in organizations, oriented to society more, serving them more.

The marketing thinking is in need of adaptation also.
Consumers are searching for better well-being: through health and wellness, connectedness, personal growth and identity and control. Everything is coming more into a ‘context’ economy that places value on customization, adaptability and transformation with the overriding value statement of “what we will value as against what we consume”.

Social innovation becomes increasingly important within communities
Facing a fairly long period of economic restructuring in most developed economies, the consistent globalisation of local jobs, rapid technology change, and polarization of opinions we seemingly are all facing a world of great uncertainty and increasing complexity.

Our governments are searching for solutions. The premium seems to be centred on new knowledge acquisition to add jobs and promote new solutions to tackle unfamiliar or persistent problems within society.

We seemingly can’t afford or tolerate in capital markets anything that seems inefficient, applying unsustainable practices or not innovating well.
Innovation- based on social problems- offers a real meaningful solution for us all.

If we can harness the best ideas for emergent problems, and explore these in a timely fashion we can move beyond our existing crisis. We all searching for personal meaning and society does offer this really.

The four main areas that Social Innovation can address and are all near you!!

1. Resolving the problems around our growing physical needs and limited resources (age, health, education)
2. The increasing need for a different type of skill and capability set that innovation seems to require and often we are not taught- in school, business or society
3. A major shift in care and service- serving the needs of others, communities and those actually close to us
4. Psychic needs- the recognition, increased understanding and care that cuts across our societies in so many different, often in bewildering ways.

Innovation is social, social is the new innovation
Social and interpersonal aspects (social media, networks, relationships) are aspects of innovation that are increasingly being recognised and understood to be critical to the innovation process.

The realisation of innovation needs people, everything else is enablers.

People hold the key role in the innovation process as the creators and carriers of knowledge. They develop it, they translate it, and they consume it.

The increased art of collaboration and co-creation

Collaboration and co-creation is emerging that have the potential to provide those value creation points society requires.

We need to learn how to cooperate. I was reading a book recently by Gaurave Bhalla called “Collaboration and Co-creation: New Platforms for Marketing and Innovation” and he offers a simple but powerful framework- Listen- Engage- Respond.

A society that can be mobilized links the economic, social and environmental spheres; it can have a cumulative dynamic effect if we can harness it.

Pushing society to solve its growing problems needs to happen
We simply do have the capacity to solve our problems but it needs the combination of private, public, voluntary sectors, philanthropists, foundations and society to come together in different ways than we have seen in the past.

That is why we are entering the era of societal innovation and we need to get business even more tuned in than ever.

We need to develop a greater social and cultural lens to translate our concerns, fears and insecurities into beliefs, values and aspirations that offer a vibrant future.

Innovation is now needed in all walks of life- this is our societal challenge.

The post Societal Innovation – challenging our future thinking first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.