Defining and building Interconnected Business Ecosystems
This past week was a highly satisfying one. Besides different advisory, consulting, and mentoring activities, this was a week when I felt I had made some significant advances in my Interconnected Business Ecosystem Framework.
It is nicely taking shape, with many parts fleshed out and described. I completed four critical investigation parts and published them on my ecosystems4innovating.com posting site.
The Interconnected Business Ecosystem framework is pioneering in its approach, which aims to help organizations navigate the complexities of today’s business landscape through this interconnected, collaborative ecosystem approach.
The core is establishing an innovative collaboration foundation to reach dynamic collaborations across a diverse ecosystem of partners that unlocks collective prosperity.
The framework looks to 1) tap into collective intelligence, 2) accelerate innovation by cross-pollination, 3) enhance resilience and agility, 4) deliver superior customer experience, and 5) optimize resource utilization across the parties sharing in this interconnected ecosystem.
Exploring Complexities of Business Ecosystem Collaborations
Why should “we” step into the realm of ecosystem collaborations? What does one organization give away and has to overcome in constraints and organizational barriers that form part of those lingering concerns regarding embracing Business Ecosystems?
The question always starts with “do I not give away more than I have as an individual entity?” What would make this attractive is overcoming many of the unknowns. It is hard to know the cost/return/risks and value when you begin this journey. Do you give away intellectual property or gain more from collaborations?
Still, you have to contain the change and disruption by recognizing these unknowns are offset by the many immeasurable benefits that arise as you explore and exploit the collaborative benefits and scope and scale potentials.
“Would it make my organization a market challenger, provide first mover advantage? How would I contain the step process, and how would I see this taking shape?”
You do need to provide a compelling case that addresses these concerns.
I offer here many distinct aspects and strategic advantages. Collaborations are challenging but exciting and potentially rewarding, but they radically differ in how you conduct business. They are complex.
Business ecosystems give strategic advantages that offer levels of uniqueness and competitive advantage and can fulfil customer needs far more than “stand-alone” solutions.
Business Collaborations are needed more today due to growing complexities and challenges requiring a radically different unlocking method. The validation for such a radical change in operating this requires working through systematically. Let’s offer some of these here.
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.
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.
Design Thinking is seen as the essential element that will combine with technology and AI in the future, yet the need for the human touch will still be essential.
As we form more around ecosystem thinking and design, design thinking will be essential as the significant enabler to creative input and provide added dimensions in this combination of human and machine..
There is a fascinating change by embracing Design Thinking principles differently in the future of innovation; organizations can foster a more profound culture of creativity, empathy, collaboration, and user-centricity, one we have often dreamed of in embracing design thinking but so often never achieving. This can lead to a radically different approach to developing innovative solutions, ones that need to consider the interplay between humans, technology, and generative AI.
It’s important to note, though, that while AI can provide valuable insights and technology automation in the design process, human creativity, critical thinking, and empathy remain essential and the core of innovation.
During this week, commencing 15th October 2023, I am discussing and explaining a framework for building innovation ecosystems on my ecosystem4innovators.composting site.
I have been exploring for some time a transformative concept to move innovation into the world of ecosystems. I outlined my proposed innovation framework in the building blocks necessary. The extended series of posts over thirteen or so, are all here on this posting site, summarized in this post of “The building out of the Composable Innovation Enterprise Framework.”
The focus was on proposing to single entities, and now I want to extend this into the future need to build innovation ecosystems that enable and connect the essential components required.
The interplay potential in exploring the combination of humans, technology and AI
This interplay between humans, technology, and AI is dynamic and involves continuous interaction, collaboration, and feedback between these elements. The future of innovation, by combining these, offers a very rich promise to provide a fascinating and different future.
Firstly, this interplay needs some higher-level thinking to put some insights into what this interplay might look like and lead to:
Innovation has the power to unlock the Energy Transition. Innovation thinking and design are needed everywhere within the energy system. Technological and systemic innovation is incredibly important to the end-user sectors of transport, industry, and buildings, as well as replacing and upgrading much of the overall system design and operation of delivering energy to power our economies.
Innovation needs to be everywhere in transforming our existing energy systems. Each day, there seems to be some level of innovation development or fresh concepts breaking through, challenging the accepted or pushing the thinking in imaginative new ways.
Innovation has a central role to play in the energy system.
We need to keep pushing for discoveries, experimentation, and demonstrating. We must nurture innovation and continuously look for ways to facilitate its pathway. Innovation comprises many enabling technologies; it needs to be built in a highly systematic way. The need is to continually look for re-imagining new market designs and business models to stimulate the changes and solutions for our future energy transformation.
There needs to be a fundamental shift in how we manage innovation, which needs the power of ecosystem thinking and design. Not only in thinking and design but in how we structure its architecture, one based on platforms, open apps, and a marketplace where like-minded people and organizations go and participate in building new impactful innovation solutions together. This needs to be in open, highly collaborative ecosystems.
We need a better conceptual framework to build, one based on knowledge-based intelligence and well-grounded, driven by dynamic and constant interactions, events, and processes, so all involved can be engaged in building solutions that have fresh impact and value within the market space identified.
My mind map of the over-arching aims of a new innovation narrative is shown below.
Innovation & Ecosystems need to be our new thinking of design and delivery
An ecosystem approach on a common, shared technology platform that can significantly enhance the discovery, experimentation, exchange, exploring, and exploiting all the diverse skills and expertise from idea to commercialization and life cycle development and maturity.
The increased pace of change requires the ability to deploy, activate and utilize resources and assets to extract the potential through the diversity of the network formed within the ecosystem and the relationships engaged in the mutual pursuit
The end result needs to show actual robustness, genuinely dynamic and holistic in its dimensions and offerings, proving among its metrics faster learning rates, leveraging all that a technology-enabled platform offers, actual collaborations and shared engagements, supporting knowledge, data, insights, and people.
Open Collaboration needs to be top of mind
Innovation needs to rely increasingly on interconnected organizations organized around a central focal point of value and impact. An ecosystem design so organizations can act differently on strategies, business models, leadership, and customer engagement to build new value and worth.
We all need to recognize that Innovation and Ecosystems go together they make the potential for more sustainable solutions, they are the new combination that enables your thinking and design of new concepts and solutions to be “worked upon” in a more open, collaborative way where a richer diversity of thinking “comes into play” and the end result has that potential to be so much better than the sum of all the parts, it magnifies the sum!
