Approaching innovation through the lens of innovation ecosystems
Approaching innovation through the lens of innovation ecosystems is a strategic and holistic way of fostering creativity, collaboration, and value creation within a complex network of interdependent players.
This perspective shifts the focus from isolated efforts to a more interconnected and dynamic approach where multiple stakeholders—such as businesses, governments, academic institutions, entrepreneurs, and consumers—work together to drive innovation.
I have spent a far amount in different posts on the importance of Innovation Ecosystems and this post is simply a prompter of its value points
Buttons & Threads: Applying a Modern Ecosystem Perspective
In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, the “buttons and threads” concept perhaps is a powerful metaphor for understanding and designing interconnected business ecosystems.
This updated perspective integrates technological advancements and business practices to illustrate how organizations can thrive in a network-centric world.
I was first introduced to the “Buttons & Threads” concept while working within one alliance I had in consulting while living in Singapore back in 2003. This concept was envisaged, in my view, before its time and ability to deliver due to the constraints of not having technology sufficiently capable and developed to be scaled and connected up, to fully gain the value that this concept offered from an Ecosystem perspective.
Achieving Meaningful Change through Business Ecosystems
Several business organizations have committed to navigating complexity, fostering dynamism and originality in approaching innovation and business ecosystems.
These have been addressing and adapting to these rapidly evolving changes by quickly spotting and seizing the potential of exploring new ways to undergo business.
We all recognise that markets are changing, complexity is growing, and challenges are more formidable to manage without extended help. This requires all businesses to face rapidly changing business environments to design their response rates and abilities to react differently. How radical will this be?
It is the connecting up of opportunities with the ability to design the solution in highly exploratory and exploitative ways of learning that begin to break down complexity and see new ways to evolve. This is where Ecosystems in thinking and design come in.
By reacting and exploring, searching for change and competitive advantage, each company below has explored through technology and partnerships opportunities that build upon their Ecosystem’s unique strengths.
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.
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.
“Making something harmonious” often means we have to reconcile differences to balance out the tensions and issues to enable and make them compatible to work.
“Fusing” human engagement with technology enablement involves creating a harmonious integration of human collaboration and technological tools to enable an ecosystem’s successful development and operation. Is that possible?
How do we go about evaluating all the possible needs of customers, as they are mostly our success arbitrators? We must gain insights and refer through multiple information sources- digital data and direct human responses – than ever before; these insights are becoming essential to our businesses.
Calibrating the right way to use technology to create mutual benefit is an increasing theme across businesses, which means we need high levels of interdependence.
Within the Composable Innovation Enterprise Framework lies the core, the different innovation stacks, and the learning components. Here, I want to briefly talk about the importance of the learning components that support the innovation design and especially the different innovation stacks.
The elements of the innovation stack are designed to support innovation’s core tasks, including learning, absorbing, assessing knowledge management, creativity, design, experimentation, and testing. By modularizing these tasks and their interfaces, organizations can assess their innovation progress by having a complete innovation system available to them, designed on specific stack elements to address knowledge operation requirements in the stage of development to commercialization.
The Innovation Stacks are ready to support different steps in the innovation engagement process
Additionally, with the upgrade in technology and platform approach, we can support the rapidly emerging human-AI collaboration needed for each building block and component and provide a step-by-step validation.
Yet it is the sequence of how we learn that becomes vital to “feed” and build the innovation stacks.
During May and June 2023, I worked through and concluded my thinking on why we needed to change our Innovation approach from far to often a linear one, and consider a new, more up-to-date, and dynamic solution for managing innovation, one that recognises the non-linear nature of so much of our undertakings today in innovation, from discovery to commercialisation.
I have called this the Composable Innovation Enterprise Framework– here is why and what went into this proposal that I feel should be adopted for managing innovation in the future.
As the investigation, validation, and viewpoints were built up over several posts, I felt summarising the series here gives you the appetite to delve into the posts themselves.
We need to shift our innovative thinking from static to dynamic.
We have been in very static, traditional approaches to innovation, very segmented and often insular, and as so often happens in innovation, it has complexities that seemingly grow and multiple changes, partly from what we discover in the development of new solutions but partly from far more rapid changes in the business landscape and our current innovation process often breaks down and limits the ability to manage this across the whole development to delivery lifecycle.
We need systems and processes that are flexible, adaptable, and can enable continuous improvements but are fully connected, transparent, and integrated across the entire business. We need to approach innovation differently through connected agility, have speed and automation more central, and provide roles for a great diverse set of participants.
A system that encourages forming strategic alliances, partnerships, and knowledge sharing to drive innovation and create shared value in open, thoughtful, and collaborative ways. This is where technology enables these connections and triggers different thinking in the quest for moving toward more extraordinary valuable solutions—the “connected” value of behaviours thinking ecosystems and operating on collaborative platforms.
After a series of posts introducing and explaining the thinking and design behind the Composable Innovation Enterprise Framework, I thought it would be a good idea to put this into a sequence of visuals that should take you through this to provide a decent understanding of its make-up and logic.
Organizations in today’s business environment need to adapt rapidly and dynamically, have the need to bring the innovation management process into a constant technological advancement, and be more tailored in its design by their own specific needs and not “offered” as a rigid set of solutions. We need to embrace a significant change in the way we “set about” innovation.
If you are interested in reading more in the series I have been posting then here are the links in the order of posting.
The importance here is recognizing the shift in mindset and thinking towards a Building Block approach to build up the Innovation Stacks. Each stack “sits” on a technology platform. Thinking through what this means requires understanding, relating, and putting a clear context of innovation, what you want to achieve, and how to set about this.
As I mentioned in a previous post, for any innovation enterprise change, I do not recommend a “big bang” solution; it should be phased to validate and grow to understand, build up validation, justify making the changes, bedding in the thinking needed and approaches to provide the level of returns and the growing understanding of cost/ benefit conversion.
The potential returns, including increased agility, improved innovation outcomes, enhanced collaboration, and long-term competitiveness, make this radical change worthwhile for organizations aspiring to thrive in today’s dynamic business environment. The ability to build the context and show its (ongoing) value makes the difference. You need a systematic approach and project staging plan.
The importance here is recognizing the shift in mindset and thinking towards a Building Block approach to build up the Innovation Stacks. Each stack “sits” on a technology platform. Thinking through what this means requires understanding, relating, and putting a clear context of innovation, what you want to achieve, and how to set about this.
