Unlocking New Innovation Value through Collaborations
I believe that innovation ecosystems transform how we approach and manage innovation. The value is in developing them out and here is why By embracing the power of ecosystems, we…
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.
Unlocking the Power of Innovation Ecosystems: A Pathway to Sustained Growth and Impact
Introduction: Innovation ecosystems have emerged as powerful catalysts for driving transformative change and fostering collaborative solutions in today’s complex and interconnected business landscape.
As organizations open up their thinking and embrace ecosystem approaches, they experience a profound shift in perspective, recognizing the value of diverse partnerships and the need for new management models.
I have written about the value of innovation ecosystems in thinking and design. Over a series of posts, this has built up different arguments or points of value.
Here I am attempting to summarize my thinking today.
I have put them into two parts, both shared here; each highlights a different emphasis on the value of innovation ecosystems but has several cross-over points, seen in different ways.
Cross-sector collaboration for Innovation Ecosystems- summary of summaries
I wrote a four part series on cross-sector innovation ecosystems in April and I felt it was worth summarizing these into one, so I engaged my new office partner, ChatGPT to deliver this in a series of summaries. I can’t argue with these and decided to post these as a valuable initial referencing point on a growing area of organization need, in cross.-sector collaborations innovation ecosystem thinking.
The four-part series on cross-sector innovation ecosystem collaborations emphasizes the importance of collaboration in tackling complex challenges. The series discusses the skills, tools, and processes required for successful cross-sector collaborations, including interdisciplinary thinking, co-creation processes, project management, cultural competence, intellectual property management, and data analytics and visualization tools.
Future industry ecosystems will be highly collaborative and adaptive.
Seizing breaking opportunities, dealing with disruptions, and delivering on more demanding customer needs are raising the complexity of managing today in our business environments.
The growing recognition is the need to build flexible ecosystems; of partners where access to a diverse on-demand set of talent, knowledge, expertise, resources and capabilities needs a broad approach in today’s world to meet these complex challenges they seem to multiply daily.
In thinking and design, ecosystems offer a different growth path and stability than the previous “go it alone”. Engagements with partners can offer shared data, new, fresh insights, the ability to share costs, shared operation experiences, and expertise to help build new approaches to more ‘connected’ collaborative innovation.
Ecosystems need re-stating for business. Are they real ecosystems?
What are the significant differences between Natural and Business Ecosystems? I wanted to look at this and make some observations and comparisons. Firstly what we seem to get wrong in many labelling of business ecosystems, where sustainability fits, and then attempting to show apparent differences between Natural and Business Ecosystems needs a greater appreciation of differences.
We label far too much as Business Ecosystems.
Applying the label of “Ecosystems” to everything degrades the understanding of its true intent. Ecosystems need to be appreciated as vital and recognized as radically different in how they function and operate.
We call something an “ecosystem, ” which simply provides a rubber stamp of being politically correct, showing the day’s currency, and trying to represent what this means provides additional value or impact. Ecosystem thinking and design are fundamental challenges to how existing organizations go about their business.
Many businesses are claiming “ecosystem” but are, in fact, extending their present, established open innovation activities and placing a greater emphasis on open networking to seek out diverse ideas. This extension alone is not new Ecosystem thinking or design; it is existing thinking.
Tackling interoperability is critical to resolve
For nearly all business entities, the ability to fully connect up the organization across people, processes, design, structures and strategies is always a work-in-progress, never worked upon to the fullest extent and rarely achieved without the most radical transformation.
I come up against the barriers to change caught up consistently in this lack of interoperability. So I have to bring it into this exploring ecosystem and platform designs posting views.
What do we miss in not having that connectivity? Recognizing silos of unconnected knowledge needs changing; we need to leverage all of our diversity and expertise. Do you really know your capabilities, competencies and capacities?
- Focusing on making technology work across organizations, internally and externally, with partners that share a common purpose. Our need is to find new growth engines and, more, sustaining. business value. it is our understanding to make exchanges work to enable creativity, and we need technology across processes to talk to each other- called interoperability.
- Uncertainty, fear of the unknown, reluctance to share and partner, or to mutually “pool” intellectual property or our research know-how in a shared collaborative effort is hard. We often hold onto our knowledge as our “source of power”, this we need to let go of and embrace a new way of believing, trusting and collaborating. We will gain far more than we lose.
- We must ask the important questions and fully recognize the answer to “what do we do well? How can we leverage and build out from this?” Are we investing enough time in networking, exchanging insights or building relationships? Knowing our core capabilities, competencies, and capacities is essential.
Let’s tackle one tough one- interoperability makes or breaks much of what we struggle to do -exchange knowledge.
Leveraging the core of what we already have
Embracing our core and leveraging these to the best of our abilities is a great place to start undertaking and preparing organizations for necessary change. This begins a journey so it is not simply efficiency we are looking for but achieving a much higher level of effectiveness to be ready to make changes ahead less disruptive.
Do you really know your capabilities, competencies and capacities?
In most cases, an organisation has a capable, familiar core – and improving the performance of this core will contribute a significant value at a lower cost and faster than introducing new tools, but the need is to understand the how, where and what.
Existing tools don’t often require being replaced by new technologies, but knowing the data flow and having greater analytics needs changing, updating and improving. Changing and improving existing processes can be much faster than introducing new approaches and tools requiring new skills.
Is this the early adopter stage for shifting towards a new Ecosystem design? Build on what you have first and then make a staged, purposeful move towards a change that is transformational, partly gained from learning from the existing first.
Discussing with ChatGPT about Business Innovation Ecosystems, their value and progress
I decided to find out what ChatCPT had as “thoughts” on both Business and Innovation Ecosystems. So in a short set of questions, these were the replies.
I have focused on Ecosystems and technology Platform understanding since 2016. I have written much of my learning here on this posting site. So far, these insights have built over 100 posts on related subjects or side issues with different degrees of influence over understanding ecosystems and platforms in their design structures and how to build them.
Business Ecosystem understanding is still emerging in the collective understanding of many business organizations. I hope, by default, they do not revert to small experiments unless in a very selective and focused way to understand certain parts of the differences that ecosystems bring.
These chats with ChatGPT are not bad; they provide a good sense of the logical structure and value of Ecosystems that I wanted to share here as a good starting point or reference for those looking to understand some of the basics around business and innovation ecosystems.
My building blocks towards Ecosystem thinking
Part-way through 2022, I drew up a list of my focal points in researching, stimulating my thinking and finding different validation points on my Ecosystem thinking and design approaches. In early January this year, I took a stop, more a reflective period in these past months, to deepen down even further my knowledge of Ecosystem thinking and design. I aim to achieve, even advancing, Ecosystem understanding for those interested to learn and seeking advice through direct engagements.
My main focus on Ecosystems comes from the innovation perspective. How can we finally combine all the different parts of the Innovation system into one, fully connected up and achieve a far more open design where contributors, both inside and outside organizations, can contribute as it is the diversity of experience needed today to give fresh value and impact on complex and challenging issues, We need that discovery to commercialization fully connected up to be leveraged fully in all the diversity of contributions.
Innovation in its challenges and problems has become more complex and challenging, both in solutions offered and in working out all the connected parts to provide products or services that are superior to the existing ones. The need to provide that essential “dynamic” of having customer engagement in their data, a growing network of connected partners providing their input, their exploring and experimenting so the inventor can learn and seek to improve the product or service accordingly.