Unlocking the Power of Innovation Ecosystems: A Pathway to Sustained Growth and Impact

June 9, 2023Posted inBusiness Ecosystems, cross-sector collaborations, Innovation Ecosystems, Knowledge Ecosystems, Network Effects, Value Creation Dynamics4 Comments

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.

Tackling interoperability is critical to resolve

February 13, 2023Posted inBusiness Ecosystems, Customer Seamless Experiences, Industrial Ecosystems, Innovation Ecosystems, Network & Collaborating Effects, Seamless Experiences, Value Creation Dynamics, Value Designing
Tackling interoperability is critical.

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?

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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

February 3, 2023Posted inBusiness Ecosystems, Ecosystems, Knowledge Ecosystems, Network & Collaborating Effects, Sustainability, Value Creation Dynamics, Value Designing
The need to leverage our existing core first in any change

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

February 1, 2023Posted inBusiness Ecosystems, Ecosystems, Industrial Ecosystems, Innovation Ecosystems, Knowledge Ecosystems, Network & Collaborating Effects, Platforms, Value Creation Dynamics, Value Designing
ChatGPT supports extracting human knowledge through AI learning

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.

Stages of a Virtual Industrial Metaverse Learning Journey

December 13, 2022Posted inBusiness Ecosystems, Ecosystems, Industrial Ecosystems, Innovation Ecosystems, Knowledge Ecosystems, Metaverse, Network & Collaborating Effects, Platforms, Value Creation Dynamics
Viewing the stages of the Virtual Industrial metaverse journey

The Industrial Metaverse has really “announced” itself this year. For me, it accelerated in my attention once Siemens and Nvidia announced their partnership to explore the Industrial Metaverse in early July.

The announcement came at the launch of Siemens Xcelerator, a digital platform and having both announcements made at the same event had a more extensive “bang” with the more attention-grabbing one, announcing the Industrial Metaverse partnership, in my view, overshadowed the other, the Siemens Xcelerator, which forms the Siemens building block towards this industrial future and the essentials required of a digital platform to accelerate any businesses digital transformation.

“Siemens Xcelerator is an open digital business platform that will accelerate digital transformation. Now companies of all sizes can access the digital technologies to transform how they compete, collaborate and connect“- Siemens website.

Through this open digital business platform, Siemens Xcelerator is featuring and building a curated portfolio of IoT-enabled hardware and software, a powerful ecosystem of partners, and a marketplace.

The journey is moving towards the Industrial Metaverse and I see it evolving in this way

Building the Innovation Ecosystem narrative

December 7, 2022Posted inBusiness Ecosystems, Ecosystems, Innovation Ecosystems, Network & Collaborating Effects, Platforms, Value Creation Dynamics, Value Designing
Building out the Innovation Ecosystem narrative

There needs to be a fundamental shift in how we manage innovation, which needs ecosystem thinking and design. Not only in thinking and design but in how we structure its architecture, one based on platforms, open apps, and a marketplace for selection appropriate for the innovation delivery intention. This needs to be in open, highly collaborative ecosystems.

We need a better conceptual framework to build, one based on knowledge-based intelligence and well-grounded, driven by dynamic and constant interactions, events and processes, so all involved can be engaged in building solutions that have fresh impact and value within the market space identified.

My mind map of the over-arching aims of a new innovation narrative is shown below.

Disruption is the new constant; forget the Status Quo

December 1, 2022Posted inBusiness Ecosystems, Ecosystems, Innovation Ecosystems, Network & Collaborating Effects, Platforms, Value Creation Dynamics
credit Storyblocks.com

Our existing business organizations need to envisage a changing world full of disruption that calls for radical constant change. They need to be ready to meet different challenges that will be consistent, complex and highly challenging, require the ability to be highly adaptive, and need high levels of open collaboration.

Connected technology needs to be central to responding rapidly and enabling this more volatile world we are facing. To achieve this responsiveness, organizations need to organize around ecosystems and platform technology approaches. This approach provides the potential ability to deliver an understanding of constant change. One that recognizes it has to be part of a growing collaborating network to thrive in this highly connected, rapidly changing and challenging world.

We need to transform or be (totally) disrupted; this is where knowing your ecosystem and network comes in as the new thinking and design of how this needs to be constructed and understood.

How and where innovation fits will depend on this transforming effect.

Why Innovation Ecosystems?

October 23, 2022Posted inBusiness Ecosystems, Innovation Ecosystems, Knowledge Ecosystems, Network & Collaborating Effects, Value Creation Dynamics, Value Designing
Reaching out for a new design built on collaborative building blocks of design

Following on from a series of posts on innovation ecosystems, especially a recent one, “Seeing innovation differently through ecosystem thinking and design” I outlined a need for a profound shift in the business landscape; well in my view, that time is rapidly approaching.

Why do we need to make a really necessary change?

Our present economic models, certainly in the West are so heavily debt-laden, from the effects of over-spending, supporting the Ukrainian war, and the Corvid crisis, and rightly supporting those in economic need and business difficulties.

One of the problems in economic distribution is that applying this in a top-down way is it can often not determine those in need from those who simply gain or are unable to deliver to those the adequate or appropriate support they require.

Our models of economic distribution are simply outdated or built on self-interest or self-promotion or simply enabling preservation for individual benefit and not for the ‘greater’ community.

The next few years are going to be very painful in further adjustments and polarization.

Our politicians continue the hackneyed phrase or idea, said or used so often that it has become boring and has no meaning, of the need for growth and prosperity.

I cannot see this way forward if we remain “locked” in the existing systems of self-interest, benefits being given to selected groups as rewards for support or simply to maintain the status quo.

Seeing innovation differently through ecosystem thinking and design

September 23, 2022Posted inBusiness Ecosystems, Ecosystems, Innovation Ecosystems, Knowledge Ecosystems, Platforms, Value Creation Dynamics, Value Designing1 Comment
Thinking of innovation as an innovation ecosystem in design

We need to re-think innovation and provide a new level of innovation integration and optimization.

What we see increasingly is the need to change to a different thinking, one of what “innovation ecosystems.” can provide.

In designing these innovation ecosystems, we might have the potential answer to overcoming and giving innovation that chance to be more central to the core of the business. It might offer us the ability to connect much of the rich internal knowledge with that outside one, that other organizations and individuals can provide, in diversity, or thought or contribution.

I envisage an ecosystem of working upon like-minded goals and ambitions, by collaborating for delivering a new form of innovation value. Collaborating in ecosystem thinking and design I would suggest opens up significant potential and combinations, that provide added value and significant opportunity for improvement on the existing offerings.

Approaching innovation on a common, shared technology platform can significantly enhance the discovery, experimentation, exploring and exploiting diverse skills and expertise through to commercialization.

No thinking time left- help

December 15, 2020Posted inAchieving innovation engagement, Advancing innovation, Building Innovation Capability, gaining innovation momentum, Shifting dynamics in innovation, Tackling innovation

Today most executives seem to be time-starved. They are constantly reacting to daily events, to fix upon the focusing and fixing of short-term performance. This applies to the top executive down to the most junior. The sheer difficulty of having most, if not all of your colleagues working remotely is making it so much harder. Keeping the business simply going is hard, demanding work. What time is there left to think beyond the present?

How can you keep the engagement, how can you find an environment that is creative, stimulating and allows for innovation? Juggling so many crisis events in different ways is exhausting.

Who is encouraging your pause button to go on as we lose more of those relaxing moments to top up our stimulations, as we all continue to isolate, with our lack of socializing, travelling, being in each others company continues to leaves us so devoid of real human interactions, apart from countless Zoom, Skype, or Team meetings? We need to replace this “void” with better thinking time to re-stimulate our curiosity and logic senses.

It just seems to me they simply don’t have this luxury to think.

Technology is rapidly taking over this thinking role, we increasingly rely on searches to at least begin our thinking. Humans are becoming the 2nd class citizen for thinking.