When you set about proposing a new Business Ecosystem framework you do need to back this up with a lot of evaluations and assessments tools, to explore readiness, maturity and determination, identifying the gaps that need to be bridged or overcome in additional resource or added partner requirements.
My business ecosystem thinking comes from three essential areas of focus over the years.
Innovation and Creativity, in all its forms and stages I have been advising upon now for twenty plus years- it has changed but not enough, still a little too manual, disjointed and so often never achieving the early promise perceived in ideas or concepts and I needed to shift perspectives.
I moved more to recognizing Innovation Ecosystems as offering a better “connected outcome” as they leveraged open innovation and brought outside collaborations far more into the solutions being persued. Innovation Ecosystems give a more distinctive business proposition and value.
The recognition of Dynamic Ecosystems came as another area of focus, the recognition of the dynamism needed and the adaptability and reslience to be built into the journey and eventual solutions.
I arrived at Business Ecosystems in 2016 to make it increasingly central to my work and offering going forward. This post explains the building up of my Business Ecosystem work, specifically on building out a Business Model Ecosystem (canvas) and what it needed to underpin input and outputs to then validate and build (potential) outcomes.
A journey of discovery and application
After hundreds of post spread out over two posting sites, I have certainly travelled my own discovery path, exploring and explaining Ecosystems to anyone interested. I am fascinated by Ecosystems. I started with platforms but quickly decided to shift to Ecosystems as platforms tend to keep you “locked-into” technology too much and I have been always more fascinated by the end outcome that emerges from innovation, concepts and understanding the creativity within the stages towards solutions.
I built my knowledge in research and focus on this area all the time, worked with different clients or studied their issues, recognizing early on that to achieve really breakthrough or distinctive innovation or business value outcomes you needed to treat Ecosystems as a fully connected-up system- most didn’t.
I have (finally) put a comprehensive frame to this Ecosystem thinking, to enable a more structured approach to my work in the future, where ever that lays in the Ecosystem world.
In these past weeks I have finally provided my integrated interconnected business ecosystem framework and this has unleashed so much to open up and publish my work more.
This framework has been a long time coming. In a series of audits I undertook with external sources on my work over the past 5 or so years, I was told I had a very extensive repository, lots of knowledge and depth across different ecosystems in explainations, solutions and needed application across business ecosystems, these were not “seeing the light of day” and that was holding me back in broader recogntion and business opportunity.
I had plenty of practical tools and frameworks that would be better put to work to accelerate the necessary adoption of Ecosystem design and thinking. One major critiscism was I lacked an integrated synthesis and a consolidated framework that ties together my thinking, research, various models, canvases and approaches.
My case study depth, measurement guidelines all remained behind a “pay wall” and that was seen to be detrimental to what and who I was wishing to advise, coach and mentor.
Opening up, letting go
So my task is changing this by opening this up, giving it clear targets and emphasis, and reinforcing the assessment of what I offer against others in this area. It is a herculean task, daunting and tough to set about this.
I wrote a Whitepaper laying out a “going forward” pathway, linking back to much of my published work where applicable, to give me a structured way to lay this out. My current posting “frenzy” is enabling the basic whitepaper to be “fleshed out” in the necessary details and public referral.
One really core (of many) needs was to bring out my Business Model Ecosystem structure.
In a post over on my other posting site (another need to sort out) I provided a structured view for so many people who are unable to explain Business Ecosystems, especially to others and it partly holds its evolution back. There is a need to unravel the complexity. My Business Ecosystem narrative keeps adjusting as I gain in my knowledge and insights.
I explained some of my thinking in approaching Ecosystem Business Model design in this initial post “Breaking down complexity, introducing the Ecosystem Business Model frame” I regard it as a base read from what follows here.
I visualized a starting point nearly all should be familiar with, of the Business Model Canvas, by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur (2004), initally called a business model ontology. I found this brilliant to think through for ONE business (for what it was designed for) but it failed for multiple businesses looking to form a Ecosystem or Network as it was rather static and missed many parts of the building blocks of the Ecosystem story but a Canvas Model approach is such a valuable way in articulating and building your thinking.
So let me explain what I needed to do for Business Model Ecosystems
While the “Business Ecosystem” is one of the vertical layers of the IIBE—focused on scaling innovation and market reach—it is also a key framing for how a business designs its value proposition and positions itself for adoption. An “Business Model Ecosystem” is a strategic approach that breaks down complexity and provides the foundational elements for constructing a business ecosystem that offers a cohesive, well-evaluated, and structured approach.
This framing is essential because it brings out multiple organizations uniqueness and allows for the creation of distinctive solutions when you combine them. Each has a common language of discussion and build. A core principle is that all business ecosystems should be unique in their design and value proposition. The IIBE methodology emphasizes that it has a profound influence on shaping the design of these models, and understanding how to combine these “building blocks” is the key to creating entirely new ecosystem structures and dynamics.
The ultimate goal of this model framing is to position the businesses for distinctive, exponential growth and sustained value by leveraging network effects and co-creation dynamics, rather than being limited by traditional, internal-resource-based strategies.
The Ecosystem Building Model– dialogue and framing
Getting to a destinctive solution I went through a series of different evaluations.
Firstly, understanding the key differences between innovation ecosystems and business ecosystems, determine the different components make up of business ecosystems, this took a few iterations to get right, apply it to a real test, in this case Smart Cities and make the evaluations within the “minds” of multiple ecosystem partners.
The outcomes of this work were giving a enhanced strategic clarity and understanding of alignment, builting an assessment readiness “stack” that enabled identification of areas of strengths and weakness and establish “dimensions of readiness” in any assessment.
Finally, I evaluated this approach of does it give a “staging” ability for formation, growth and maturity phases or different client entry needs recognizing the constantly of “mapping-back” in readiness and re-assessment as business changes or determined by market opportunity or competitive need.
Out of this emerged a comprehensive business model ecosystem approach
Readiness diagram (again)
The core dimensions or building blocks
So by establishing the core dimensions of Strategic Alignment, Shared Value Proposition, Ecosystem Dynamics, Governance, Organizational Readiness, Parter Ecosystem Readiness, Innovation Capacity and Culture, Technology Readiness (sharing), Social and Environmental Impact, Sustainable Positioning, Resource and Cost Efficiency and Market Position Diversity provides for a really “rich” readiness assessment to debate and explore, to gain stakeholder identification and alignment of their strengths and weakness on a given set of criteria.
Further extensions within the work– Assessments, Readiness and Maturity Frameworks
I went on to build Dynamic Ecosystem Readiness framework and a Platform evaluation assessment and took this into a structured layering “architecture” that triggered a fresh strand of research on Universal Applications and Ecosystem-specific succcess patterns emerged.
This grew into the ability of applying a “reverse engineering” approach to many ecosystem organizational examples including Siemens, Phillips. Google, Microsoft, Apple, Salesforce, Amazon, Walmart and a number of others.
In further posts I will be exploring differences in “cross-cutting” ecosystems and the refinements needed when moving across industry and market boundaries and refining those different partner models. Each contributed to the Business Model Ecosystem thinking and final design.
The ability to evaluate the current state of any readiness has generated multiple ecosystem maturity and readiness frameworks, operational and health assessments and internal audit and on-line presence assessments, a series of guides and design for response and creation, interactions, conceptual structures ready to be applied, adopted and tested.
All the work undertaken has given me a structured dialogue and discovery output that has amazed me. It has become a “story of creation” to discuss in the diversity of its parts.
This is all aimed at my coaching, mentoring and advising quest. Talk to me by making contact here for discoving how this work and the IIBE approach can be applied to your specific circumstances or ambitions.