Monthly Archives: November 2017

Industry is lagging but catching up in its choices of platform offerings

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The platform has become essential for much of our social and direct engagements. The likes of Facebook, Amazon, Airbnb and many others are transforming much of our digital engagement for our social and private needs.

The lag has been connecting industry up, to the transforming value of ecosystems, to collaborate and build new value on co-developed platforms. There are some leading voices on this, determined to be the orchestrators- exploiting first mover advantage- who are heavily investing in the software and analytics to demonstrate value for not just themselves but drawing in lead customers to offer real, added ‘connected’ value.

I am watching three specifically in the digital industrial space of GE, Bosch and more recently Siemens as they build their ecosystems and offer their platforms as solutions into Industry.

These are among the growing voices on different aspects of innovation, connecting machines, data and new human understanding, of adding the new value or focusing on even more on the preventative aspects where industrial assets need to be constantly performing, as essential. For instance in aviation, power, energy, transport, and healthcare. They are at the forefront of reshaping entire industry dynamics. Continue reading →

Rethinking the Value of Business Ecosystems

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Business is far from usual, it is transforming in front of our eyes. A business has to simply accept this is a changing world and business ecosystems are coming of age, perhaps adding more complexity but also to help bridge this transformation. The traditional silo mentality, the belief that your industry boundaries are immune to change and new challenges, is a grave mistake.

There is, or should be, a recognition that all businesses should find opportunities to coalesce into networked ecosystems. They need to open up to a far greater potential than is presently on offer to each individual entity, unless you have deep pockets (Apple), as well as so many app developers lining up to be part of their ecosystem, or patient shareholders (Amazon) continuing seeing growth but limited profit return, or inflows of revenue (Google), where you can invest in new, potentially huge but speculative, technology-related business concepts.

Ecosystems can offer so much connecting value out there to ‘form’ around.

We are witnessing a very radical change, driven by technology, increasingly disrupting and breaking down past traditional boundaries, partly built to defend positions so as to achieve economic scale. There is a new economic logic to build even greater scale, it involves greater complexity, yet its value proposition is to strive towards offer greater customer experience and satisfaction, where the solutions are valued highly in social and economic value. Ones that get closer to their connected expectations and daily needs for solutions to solve, in far better ways, than that are presently offered. Innovative design has become paramount to these new offerings.

The market dynamics are also changing. Those businesses with a different mindset of global trade and value proposition building will benefit. Risk is taking on different forms to capitalize on these changes. Today we can all be liberated through the exploitation of technology and new radical innovation design. In some ways, it has become a new ‘land grab’ panning for digital gold. We are at the point of building a new frontier that is calling for business change.

As we think through the impacts of the changes we need to reflect on some of its parts. Some of these are outlined here: Continue reading →

We are failing to deliver radical innovation. Why?

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I see the growing importance of ecosystems and platforms for those that want a thriving future, these are the ones that simply “get this” need to connect into a wider ecosystem to build better value and solutions that customers want. The business imperative of today and near-term future is designing around ecosystems that seek out collaborative platform solutions.

Regretfully for those that don’t, the ones that hang on to the belief that their island of knowledge and their product offering are still good enough to meet the customer needs will face a very uncertain and bumpy future.

This is a delusion, utterly deluding, to continue as you have previously, as customers are today looking at “connected experiences” and these come out of far more complex back-ends of delivery, orchestrated on platforms, where the leverage of partners, technology, and common cause come together in highly collaborative ways. Also working on solutions that are recognizing that the front delivery end provides simplicity, ease of access and completion of the service or experience customers are looking for, far more as providing a more complete comprehensive, connected solution to their needs.

Continue reading →