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.

The different challenges seen in this terrific depiction provide the sort of dialogue and efforts that needs to go into ‘crafting’ the innovation vision. It is hard, thoughtful work. Let’s look at each of these a little more.
The Time Challenge

We get caught in annual planning cycles that often leave little time for ‘considered’ opinion and debate. The annual plans all come in a deluge, and this is plainly wrong. Creating a vision needs a lot of time to consider all the aspects. The ‘time gap’ seriously impacts the vision’s success and clarity of purpose.
The Diversity Challenge
Within the same board room do you have a diversity of opinion; you have that up and down any organization. Getting the views first out in the open, then managing the conflicting aspects and dealing with the ‘polarization effects’ all is difficult. This is where a dedicated focus, a Chief Innovation Officer, can really make a difference. To get people to talk about the vision, what it should stand for, what needs to happen leads eventually to greater clarity.
The Relationship Challenge
Managing the relationships both within and outside the organization when it comes to the right thinking on innovation is hard, converting doubters, drawing out differences, improving the quality of any conversations around innovation (ideally with facts, not conjecture) and raising the enthusiasm to engage is crucial to moving towards the right vision.
The Vision Gap Challenge
There is a reality to what and where you are and the perceived gap that needs addressing honestly. We tend to be very poor at this, is, holding a ‘creative’ tension that can stimulate and create a vibrant and exciting innovation vision. We try to dampen the divergence in opinions far too early so we can (quickly) got to convergence. This ‘keenness’ to take away the ‘creative’ tension tends to replace it with a potential set of ‘destructive’ ones, which often creates much of the beginnings of the barriers to innovation. People resent not being well listened to or allowed time to develop their arguments.
The Vision and its Success
If you get people to ‘freely’ talk about innovation, its importance, its impact and can ‘paint’ the future in broad brush strokes, they achieve a growing clarity and enthusiasm. They often miss a critical component of a sense of shared identity.
Innovation is complex; it deals with formal and informal mechanisms. There is an awful lot to constructing a solid innovation vision but believe me, it is even harder to understand the right components that make up the innovation strategy, so it eventually becomes a well-articulated innovation strategy. This visual makes up for the thousands of words you would need to describe how and what makes up an innovation vision.

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The post Going beyond the 5 bold steps offered to Reimagine the American Innovation Agenda first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The report “Five Bold Steps Towards a Reimagined American Innovation Agenda“, written in February 2021, argues for embracing these five bold steps of story, stewardship, strategy, scaling, and system reimagine innovation for the decade ahead.

In all honesty, it is a little underwhelming, not just the bold but simple five steps but the short document of five pages. It assumes a position, and that is dangerous.

Their argument regarding innovation is that Americans have come to see U.S. leadership as a birthright, as a matter of course. In my view, they lost the leadership mantle for innovation years back. I totally agree it should and needs to come back as a bedrock of future growth, prosperity and dramatically altering today’s landscape.
The authors quite rightly recognize most innovation has drifted to the two coasts. U.S innovation has got fixated on technology as the ultimate solution (to all our ills). Partly, this is not wrong, but it cuts off all the different types of innovation the U.S needs.

It needs a greater regenerative type of innovation; it needs to find ways to fund the incremental or distinctive needs to resolve local, national or logical problems when the time, inclination and appropriate funding can be made available.

Far too much of the investment money is chasing the big breakthrough. The chase for unicorns, fast scale, disrupting existing and constantly reiterating what is successful into the next version. Of course, having companies like Apple, Tesla, or whoever building on monopolies or technology prowess is great.

Often this innovation is off the backs of poorer paid countries cranking out the final product, and I think of apple especially here. The money they make, where is this being invested back to build innovation capacity?

Clearly, with the Biden big deals flowing through, who will be hoovering up that money. Will it go to the entrepreneur sitting in the middle of the country, or will those there simply sit back and wait for the payouts and funding offered by the Government?

How is the middle of the country not going to avoid being further left behind as clean energy positions closer to its markets, the coasts and not account for the coal, steel and other heavy industries that can’t escape legacy within a bold reinvigoration plan? Hence why terming innovation reinvigorating allows for a different narrative to be built.

The authors claim, as step one, to reclaim the narrative. They leave it as stories needed that connects with citizens from all walks of society. I would argue firstly, is to find out the stories of the citizens and then build up the innovation narrative. Bottom-up, not top down. to bring positive change (regeneration).

I think the U.S is way off what the authors talk of shared national purpose and share national values. Really with all the current destructive storylines, fake or blatant. Will this change? Will the U.S ever reforge a national narrative of shared purpose or values? That is questionable and some time out if it ever does. The idea of “catalytic aspirations”, “great purpose” sounds wonderful, does that gel with what is being faced today and every day by a majority?

Step two: We then get into empowerment, often as an innovator; I die a little hearing this. How often does empowerment really happen? What I like here is the harvest, organize and scale concept. But not through stewardship. America does have enormous innovation value lying in its foundations, institutions, and research bodies, but these are fragmented or lacking real national cohesion.

The authors are right, innovation remains less than the sum of the parts. Find a way to bring those parts together, for example, to transform energy or other big global challenges, and America will begin to find its way back to the top of the innovation pinnacle. Throwing money at a problem is not necessarily the answer but it certainly helps. Others less fortunate rely on ingenuity, then search for the money.

Their suggested steps three and four- develop a coherent national strategy seems so out of fashion in America. They point out disparate policies towards scientific research, technology, commercialization, information and communication technology, education and skill development, let alone tax, trade, intellectual property, government procurement and regulatory policies all need desperately fixing in some form of integrated fashions. Can they be pulled together, or is this too far gone, lost in individual ownership, funding or constraints?

The love of “making it scalable” I do not buy at this point in time. My counter-proposal is to make it accessible, and over time it will scale. We need engagement more than empowerment. Yet as they point out, 80% of the venture capital is in four U.S states. Equitable, fair, or even hope of changing this is not pitched on the scale, where investors articulate as a must. Going back to basics, funding these in local, highly focused ways gets closer to my accessible alternative.

People want to start seeing growth in themselves, in their earning, in their self-esteem, and that needs to be local in new infrastructure, economic activity so the community gains and begins to pick up its vibrancy. Not in payouts those simply get spent on keeping going.

The investments proposed by the Biden administration in science, technology and R&D of $300 billion will go where. The key industries identified are all or mostly based on the two coasts.

These are essential to fund, promote and develop as technology is one of the critical places that must have an American dominance to counter other parts of the world but with the high levels of foreign talent that eventually takes what they know back?

What about tackling environmental, climate, and nature challenges on a similar scale?  These can be regenerating the middle of America.

The author’s last bold point to maximize human, intellectual and financial capital takes me back twenty or so years in all the discussions on leveraging the intangible capitals. I am far more in knowledge and nature capital but brought up to date centred around ecosystem designs, so they generate the whole not stay trapped in silos.

Information, actionable, honest, believable information tied to knowledge access and relationship connections, will do as much more to restore innovation. Of course, the world needs STEM, but for its grassroots, it needs the rebuilding of Reputations & Trust, Culture & Values, Skills & Competencies that are not technically driven but non-technical.

I know what is wanted in America is a resurgence of its pioneering spirit. We all want that.

Applying these five bold steps might have many parts that need fixing to keep it globally competitive. Still, America’s innovation engine is so lumpy and firing on a few cylinders even with this call to action. Success in a few areas distorts and blinds those who are not seeing a continued hollowing out of any innovation and creativity based in America employed by Americans. These five steps are simply not enough, even to get the conversation flowing.

Innovation to take hold in America needs a deeper, broader fix. It needs to be inclusive but not on technology but on some of its oldest attraction points, hard work, adventure, pioneering, use of both hands and brain to thrive and renewal in itself.

These five bold steps don’t provide the force of change necessary. It needs far more Stephen and John.

The post Five Bold Steps suggested for the American Innovation Agenda first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Today we are facing many current disruptions where we need to react fast and intelligently. There are many situations we are facing that are a race against time. As we continue to respond to Covid-19, technology has the power to reduce the complexity often faced, speed up and contribute to solutions that help resolve pressing issues.

We recognize that equally as important as the technology are the people using the technology. Having people at the centre of designs enables more intelligent, rapid and lasting innovation.  The Digital Twin is where data from the physical and virtual world come together and is increasingly where people and technology come together to resolve many of today’s challenges.

Applying human-centred innovation

Tony Hemmelgarn, the CEO of Siemens Digital Industries Software, presented “Human-centred Innovation” at the Hannover Messe show (April 12^th to 16^th, 2021), which was held in a virtual environment.

Siemens provided a three-day event showcasing their hardware and software solutions and many other technology innovations.

Tony touched on how digital technology is being used to solve today’s present issues and how working with the comprehensive digital twin and having people at the heart of the design make a significant contribution to some current challenges.

Throughout the presentations, the digital twin was positioned as the catalyst for change, with the digital twin featured in nearly every presentation and across the stories of Siemens customers from multiple industries.

The powerful engine with digitalization

I see this digital twin as the powerful engine under the Siemens bonnet to drive growth and Industrial and Societal Transformation. The digital twin spans so much in industry and changing the products we use through its predictive, modelling, optimizing approach.

Recently, Frost and Sullivan praised the Siemens Software portfolio: “such a diverse line of solutions offered in a modular, open portfolio makes Xcelerator a game-changing catalyst for companies of all sizes.”

Tony’s examples show the power of Human-centred innovation and how digitally enabled software solutions have been in powerful use to resolve some critical issues in the past year.

The rapid need for Vaccines

In the past, vaccine development has traditionally been a process measured in years, if not decades. Over the last ten years, new vaccine technologies have been increasingly available. Fast-forward to today and the crisis we all face with COVID-19, we needed a rapid acceleration of vaccines from discovery through trial validation and production ramp-up. Already most of the major pharmaceutical or biotechnology companies had some levels of vaccine platform technologies.

American pharmaceutical company Moderna took 42 days to produce an experimental vaccine. GSK, in collaboration with Atos and Siemens, have been building and ramping up their vaccine facilities and have successfully developed a digital process twin through an innovative partnership. Just announced is the collaborative work that Siemens has been doing with BioNTech, getting involved in converting existing facilities in Germany to produce the mRNA-vaccine project.

With a digital twin, Siemens’ customers use different technologies to create a virtual world where research and development can explore new therapies and vaccines. A digital twin can simulate the process like cell culture, fermentation, formulation and filling. A digital twin combines all biological processes and physical models into a single integrated virtual image. It is the power of Siemens’ simulation and automation that has enabled the “race against time.”

The pharmaceutical and life science industry embraces technology to accelerate research and development to production by recognizing the value of simulation and modelling by merging the virtual and physical worlds. This allows infinite opportunities from industrial data to extend and build out the digital twin capabilities faster, more expanding ways with a greater push towards a complete embrace of digital transformation.

Keeping Us Safe for Resuming Travel

We all have had imposed on us severe travel restrictions. Airlines are looking to encourage us back onto their planes. Using Siemens’ Xcelerator portfolio, the need was to design and simulate air quality.

Using part of the solutions available by simulating airflow, calculating filter rates, the ability to design a filter for cabin air to change every 2-3 minutes was tackled. The ability to simulate and analyze detailed sensing data allowed for modelling and finding a more optimal design that has progressed to more innovative and safe solutions for air quality.

The Digital Manufacturing Factory

Manufacturing that has been taking their digital journey before the COVID-19 crisis was equally hit but have been far more able to react, adjust and reposition themselves in a particularly challenging, volatile time.

Initially, to get Manufacturing restarted, Siemens Digital Industries Software introduced workplace distancing solutions to manage that “next or new normal” in manufacturing.

Extending out the Digitally Connected Factory

Across the Siemens Virtual event held in Hannover Messe week, the examples of so many changes have been enabled by using digital solutions, especially the Digital Twin contribution. You can view these by first registering even after the event has closed to view these significant stories of how the Digital Twin has radically altered the design and management of different industries, plants, and adaptive approaches to design.

Siemens Digital Industries Software approach’s foundation is Xcelerator; it is at the core of the strategy.

This integrated portfolio of software, services, and an application development platform for electronic and mechanical design, system simulation, manufacturing, operations, and lifecycle analytics.

As pointed out in this talk, the three levers provide a comprehensive digital twin, a personalized adaptable and modern approach and a flexible open ecosystem but delivering in a closed loop to individual needs.

The story around Human-centred innovation shows the power of technology.

As Tony states, Siemens’ Digital Enterprise solutions are solving not just today’s challenges but tomorrows. The digital twin is all around us if we look and explore digitalization and gain productivity in new, exciting, and accelerating ways. It is becoming essential, for example, in managing across a manufacturing plant, designing a new aircraft or modelling our cities.

The digital twin brings solutions to life quickly; it can provide generative design techniques, allow for mass customization, it is flexible and self-organizing. It is a compelling digital solution.

As we learn to merge the physical and virtual worlds, it is the ingenuity of the people that are at the centre of the design that enables this more intelligent, raid and lasting innovation that derives from the application of all within the Siemens digital twin; they drive the imagination and curiosity to solve complexity.

Reference Links

The Siemens Hannover Messe event. Register through this link for on-demand viewing: sie.ag/3tnhVD4

Introductory videos

https://video.mentor.com/embed/6390475a-6c60-4f14-b4c5-ae303897f24f!

The post Human-centred innovation in a digital world. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.