Completing transitions through innovation, ecosystems and sustainability thinking
Today, our innovation activity needs to transition through collaborating and co-creating, applying ecosystem thinking and platform designs for business. We increasingly recognize the future value and impact for businesses to grow, is through combining innovation, and external collaborations, and ensuring solutions are more sustainable.
We need to have a new open architecture for undergoing this transformation that is scalable and built, combining technology and tools, for speed and effectiveness.
Making Sustainability central to innovation capability building requires a new ecosystem-designed way that connects the parts.
Let me tell you my story of what I believe; it continues to evolve
Today’s challenge is to build the capacity, competencies and capabilities to be different, more resilient and resourceful. These need to be built upon a deep appreciation of what innovation can provide; the stimulus for creative solutions that have sustained lasting growth.
Converging ideas and thinking brings out creativity and different innovative solutions
Innovation ecosystems are gaining good traction to build out a more robust innovation management system that can offer the interconnected network of organizations the opportunity to create and commercialize new ideas, concepts, products and services.
Participating in innovation ecosystems does have a number of advantages
Greater access to a wider range of resources and expertise through the bringing together of a diverse set of organizations that can bring together technologies and customer insights from different perspectives, drawing in different resources not usually available to one organization to offer a greater potential to innovate more effectively, in choice, options, shared thinking and risk.
Increased collaborations and co-creation through innovation ecosystems can foster the greater potential for collaborations and co-creations between associated parties that can “trigger” innovations that feed from these growing cooperations forming between the parties
Greater scalability and speed. By leveraging the resources and capabilities of other organizations, the potential to scale the innovation efforts in new ways, across different channels, not open to one organization and give different levels of speed from the establishment and reputations the partners have built up in their respective markets.
Greater flexibility and adaptability in different, more collective and imaginative ways. Multiple alerts to market changes, conditions and customers’ needs can stimulate a growing adaptability and solution design, more modular or progressive in response
Greater potential for sustainability and social impact. Innovation ecosystems increasingly need to be designed to offer more sustainable and socially responsible solutions,having partners who manage different parts of the lifecycle, can create opportunities in designing redundancy and ease of replacement that extends and expands a product’s solution, giving an ongoing positive impact while achieving re-occurring business success.
Having a purposeful innovation ecosystem, well-designed and built for highly collaborative partnerships can yield very different results than managing innovation alone. These are not one-size fits, the understanding of what is needed to turn an ecosystem concept into a winning one may have specific needs for one group, compared to another. Multiple ecosystems allow for the ability to bring together the specific partners needed to achieve one goal but recognize these changes, depending on the challenges and complexities of any innovation concept requiring this collaborative approach.
Innovation ecosystems should be dynamic and highly adaptive, as participants join, others leave as different solutions are sought and evolve from collaborations, co-creation, new technology and new business model emerges
The key is to create an environment that encourages and supports the flow of open sources of ideas and resources among like-minded participants and enables them to collaborate and learn from each other in mutually beneficial ways to advance their specific business.
