The building blocks of open innovation building towards Business Ecosystem design.
By incorporating Open Innovation Strategies as the next building block, businesses can create a dynamic and expansive innovation ecosystem beyond internal and partnership and certain collaborative boundaries.
This approach supports a culture of continuous learning, adaptation, and external collaboration, positioning the organization for sustained success in an ever-evolving business landscape that recognizes and learns how to collaborate and co-create, moving towards recognizing the value of Business Ecosystems.
Embracing Open Innovation Strategies as the next building block complements the collaborative nature of Business Ecosystems and broadens the innovation landscape out into a world of new possibilities where collaboration, co-creation and cooperation become realised for building and delivering products, concepts, and services that have new unique value and impact.
New Business Design- Empower Your Business Ecosystem.
When looking at radically different thinking and design in business, where Ecosystems become central, you need to ask yourself what industries would benefit from such an alternative design and thinking due to the changing complexities and challenges they are facing.
Are these pressures in their known and emerging markets posing future threats for businesses and whole market sectors?
Markets today are radically changing and are more demanding. The growing need to face growing complexity and challenges constantly unsettles the normal.
The value of opening up and embracing Ecosystems in design and thinking is that you can attract diverse expertise and knowledge into fresh partnerships and collaborations that can piece together radically different value propositions and shift competitors’ positioning.
I decided this posting site to be the principal supporting site for building different insights and understandings of Ecosystems. The main framework around the Hierarchy of Business Ecosystems Needs is over on www.ecosystems4innovating.com; in a series of detailed posts on each layer of the Ecosystem construct, take a look at each part in explanations of why each Ecosystem is interconnected and feeds the others.
On this site, I have been exploring issues associated with building Ecosystems, each valuable to read, such as collective learning, resistance, values of interconnected layers, barriers, a blueprint and a base post of “Why Ecosystems” and illustrating where and how ecosystems think and design are emerging.
Scroll down the home page or enter the topic in the search box to find these ready to read on this posting site. They provide a sound basis for considering Ecosystems by working through the views offered.
In this post, I provide different industries’ challenges that lend themselves to Ecosystem thinking and Design.
Paradigm shifts come from collective learning within a Business to build different Ecosystems.
How can we realize the power of ecosystem thinking and design and its growing value to enterprises? This will come through collective learning, exchanging and exploring a diversity of opinions and experiences. Achieving alternative perspectives enables a level of discovery that enables innovation
it is the need to embrace new organizational design that Ecosystem thinking needs to be considered for building a different approach to the new business needs based on the recognition that the way we approach management in markets is going through radical change.
Today, we face fast-changing markets, constant change and growing complexity; customers are opening up to different and diverse experiences, and it is learning and gaining new understanding and knowledge that will give us the more significant potential to expand and build out new value and growth opportunities.
Ecosystem thinking and design require continuous collective learning.We require different conversations.
Resistance to Business Ecosystems does need to be broken down and addressed to realize the power of Ecosystem thinking and design and its growing value to Enterprises.
So why are we not doing this today?
Adopting any business ecosystem-centric approach involves a significant shift in mindset, culture, and organizational structures.
While some forward-thinking organizations have embraced aspects of ecosystem thinking, there are several challenges and barriers that hinder widespread adoption.
In the suggested Hierarchy of Business Ecosystems, recognizing the value of an interconnected series of (dedicated) Ecosystems that build out innovation, business, dynamic flexibility, and connected enterprise layers does need to address the natural instincts to resist the adoption of business ecosystems in the fear of sharing what we know, against what we often don’t know as it is outside our restricted view.
The question is whether we need to recognise the opposite; it is the need to embrace building a different approach to the new business needs of fast-changing markets, constant change and growing complexity and opening up to different and diverse experience and knowledge gives us the greater potential to expand and build out new potential opportunities.
Interconnecting Layers for the Hierarchy of Ecosystem Needs
So, the value of establishing this hierarchy of business ecosystem in its needs requires understanding why it is depicted as interconnected layers. Is this establishing a new sustaining excellence for businesses?
They are when combined, collective in significance and impact and provide a higher level of radicality to present and offer as an alternative to today’s business and economic growth approach.
Why? Well, today, businesses are facing growing complexity and more demanding challenges. To gain growth and find new value, they must look far more toward managing collaborative ecosystems to co-create and build a sustainable platform to grow.
When I was thinking through this Hierarchy of Business Ecosystem Needs, I asked myself a series of reality checks to keep me on this path of discovery and validation.
While ecosystem-based approaches offer numerous advantages, there are also challenges and potential barriers that organizations may face.
As I was building out the Hierarchy of Business Ecosystem Needs, you have to consider many of the (current) issues and challenges being faced by advancing Ecosystem thinking and design. The business case adds more value and needs to think more about the impact of ecosystems in highly connected ways.
I believe in building the foundation layer, the Innovation Ecosystem pushes the “grey cells” and gives the best platform for integrating a comprehensive Ecosystem framework in my proposal, which comprises an Innovation Ecosystem, a Business Ecosystem, a Dynamic Ecosystem and the Enterprise Ecosystem.
The question of barriers and issues must be addressed to comprehensively understand the values of synergies, interdependencies and the exponential value created when these Business Ecosystem layers I am proposing in my Hierarchy framework are interconnected. Constructing an interconnected business ecosystem framework is undoubtedly “no walk in the park”; it is hard work.
The Hierarchy Of Business Ecosystem Needs- A Blueprint View
Several vital considerations come into play in developing a blueprint to thrive and find solutions that provide growth and fresh impact to a business amidst growing complexity and uncertainty. One that argues for a different business approach, with Ecosystem thinking and design being central.
When I was pulling together my view of the needs and contributions Ecosystems can provide businesses, I recognized an identification of aspects as essential to consider, this blueprint consideration and then addressed what was necessary to provide a comprehensive solution for offering a Hierarchy of Business Ecosystem Needs as a viable alternative to the current way we undertake business.
Let’s explore these considerations to ensure a comprehensive approach to addressing the challenges at hand when building an ecosystem hierarchy for future growth and prosperity.
Being explicit about ecosystems in the context of organizational strategies provides several distinct advantages compared to traditional approaches. We increasingly need to consider ecosystems in our thinking and design to leverage more significant insights, extract knowledge and build on collaborative experiences and diversity of views.
Much of business today is caught up in managing short-term change that is growing in complexity and challenges.
So the challenges in the past year have been highly focused on supply chain disruptions, plugging gaps in technology solutions that can provide a higher flexible, agile, and advanced planning and production environment and continue to keep moving towards securing a more sustainable future that reflects the need to become carbon neutral, net zero.
Yet disruption is increasing; weare in a volatile world of constant change.
Today’s systems are highly stretched and have been designed and built for a steady, repeating business, the era of yesterday. Flexibility, agility, and adaptability have yet to be addressed sufficiently in design or mind shifts for our present and future operations to provide a different, more agile operating environment. Consistently has been the norm, whereas today it reacts to constant change coming from multiple, often unpredictable situations.
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- interoperabilitymakes or breaks much of what we struggle to do -exchange knowledge.
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.
