In any ecosystem thinking and design, we do need to find this “sweet spot” for encouraging more innovation. For me, it is the ability to build the dynamics within the involvement required.
We live in a world where we are having greater connectivity than ever before. We are increasingly engaged in far greater interactivity with easy access to social and organizational tools than ever before.
We are encouraged to share what we know increasingly so others can build on this, or shape its original concept into a different value proposition simply by having that triggering idea and seeing the ‘possibilities’ to build upon it.
Within business, ecosystem thinking and design have become central to how organizations go about their search for value and impact. This thinking is recognizing a network of interlinked companies that dynamically interact. This set of dynamic interactions enables both an increased intensity of purpose from cooperations to seek out different levels of competitive advantage.
“Ecosystems are dynamic and co-evolving communities of diverse actors who create and capture new value through both collaborations and competition need, to deliver unique propositions against increased customer demand and expectations.”
Ecosystems comprise of suppliers, customers and a growing diversity of organisations to merge their thinking, that works through common processes and systems, mostly enabled in a cloud environment and accepting a common platform to gather and exchange. Over time a pattern of behaviours builds to enable a flow of ideas, and concepts, drawing upon available talent and resource capital to coalesce around a set of goals to vision.
Ecosystems create stronger barriers for competition to duplicate due to the inherent complexity within the network. The leveraging of technology, in both software and hardware, in combining research competence, enables a different level of creativity and innovation than just in one company alone.
Perhaps we have a new innovation equation to explore and exploit more
It is the degree of connectivity times the degree of interactivity times the degree of sharing, that is within our growing ecosystem community that enables the innovation to emerge.
We need to find the spaces to innovate and those are coming increasingly from higher levels of collaboration and sharing.
I wrote this piece “the chance to think differently about ecosystems for innovation” providing some thoughts on why ecosystems are vitally important to innovation in the future.
Ecosystem design in today’s more open world where technology allows us all higher degrees of freedom, discovery and ability to make the innovation space a vibrant one.
A connected world where it is the collaboration we undertake, that leads us to break out of the existing, changing the known, investigating the unknown by the ‘degrees of our willingness to explore and exploit all that is around us, if we only reach out and be open to new levels of thinking and collaboration.
For that it is this connectivity, interactivity and sharing that creates the dynamic environment and technology becomes the enabler to making this creative space the space for innovation to emerge.
** If you are interested in delving into the understanding of ecosystem designs and thinking then please go to my dedicated posting site for Ecosystem thinking