Business ecosystems have grown in real importance for me to focus upon. Alone on this site I have written around 200 plus posts that relate to ecosystems and platforms since 2016 when I started separating my innovation thinking with this business ecosystem one.
Today, I have turned full circle, there is a need for merging these back but into innovation ecosystems for one and business ecosystems for the other, to explain different essential value parts..
Having an ecosystem-centric approach has growing advantages to navigate complexity and strive towards a new level of sustaining growth and impact.
Designing Ecosystems for collaboration, co-creation and extending your business out in radically different ways needs thinking through. It has become essential for the sustainable future tacking more complex and challenging issues
Let me provide some thoughts on this:
Why Ecosystems are valuable?
Ecosystems do encourage a more holistic perspective that needs to consider the interconnectedness of all the multiple internal and external elements to stay adaptable. Why? To build a greater resilience to navigate uncertainties and build in different, more radical ways those capabilities and capacities for sustained adaptability and resilience for the future.
Ecosystems foster collaboration and innovation by bringing together diverse entities and encourage all organizations to tap into external expertise, knowledge and experience. The thinking allows organizations to address more complex and those interconnected challenges more effectively.
They require a greater agility, different levels of responsiveness and flexibility to changes occurring at faster, more sudden shifts and explore different emerging opportunities that is increasingly being demanded by customers. There is a need for having more connected, valuable solutions than just one organization can offer.
We need the collective abilities that combine thought and imagination, with technology and integrated solutions and services that respond and adapt, that provide answers that combine and shift the expectations into the new normal that is valued and gives resolution to the problems customers want to resolve such as integrated banking, one stop shopping, combining holiday arrangements, home services, and solving health issues on demand.
Thinking Ecosystems requires an emerging blueprint.
The blueprint is required to enable organizations to thrive and grow and find solutions in the face of this growing complexity and uncertainly found in markets as technology and different competitors compete in disrupting old, often well-established business models. Ecosystems thinking and design has the potential for transformative power for a different impact, value and growth.
The search is to connect that design so each part contributes to the new whole. To achieve this the value of synergies, interdependencies and unique value when these layers of cooperation and collaboration from a diverse set of players connects into this integrated thinking.
Any blueprint has a central need to be highly dynamic, adaptive and work in a shared collaborative framework to navigate the complexities this requires in the changing modern landscape being faced.
What becomes essential to consider and strive to understand in Ecosystem approaches
Thinking ecosystems does require a radical mindset shift. A deep understanding of complexity for navigating intricacies and identifying patterns, commonalities and synergies. This needs deploying an agile and adaptive structure and mindset that enables quick adjustments to changing conditions.
Technology integration becomes paramount to streamline operations, enable flows of knowledge, data and conversations so enhancing communication methods to gather and interpret insights becomes crucial.
Risk management changes, scenario managements becomes more dynamic to constantly prepare the organization in direction, investments and adaptive partnerships for addressing potential challenges seen and often unseen until they happen.
The importance of stakeholder engagement needs to foster deeper understanding of actions and partner arrangements required to provide collective commitment and recognition of the impacts and shifts in “predicted” returns
The value of taking a layered interconnected approach to Business Ecosystems
I have been proposing an interconnected business ecosystem framework in the past eighteen months. It has evolved from being seen as a “hierarchy” approach, more to this interconnected one. It has been evolving from a framework based on four (identified) ecosystems of innovation ecosystems, business ecosystems, dynamic ecosystems and enterprise ecosystems in design and thinking.
Today I feel it has more ecosystem layers and these include an entrepreneurial or start up ecosystem, an enterprise-to-enterprise (E2E) ecosystem and finally the interconnected organization ecosystem. Not all are needed depending on specialized management approaches, focused resource allocations, strategic flexibility, clarity of purpose and focus on delivery intent.
Within this recent post I define these through each ecosystems concept approach, it’s positioning and focus area that define the ecosystems, and suggest the distinctiveness and value parameters this gives.
This framework provides the alternative paradigm for business and economic growth shifting from a linear to dynamic collective (in parallel) approach requiring more unification of vision and collaborative value sharing where adaptive learning becomes the core competency for responding to change and embracing it.
The need to break down resistance to Business Ecosystem designs so we can embrace them
The resistance to change has been a constant in business and society for ever. Traditional mindsets, risk aversion, organizational silos, short-term focus, lack of education and exposure to alternatives to see the value all stand in the way of change, Being able to have a different awareness, recognizing and handling disinformation and misinformation which can include inaccurate, incomplete, misleading, or false information as well as selective or half-truths gives the realities that nothing different comes easily.
Technology challenges, regulatory and compliance concerns, often lagging in understanding, or achieving new standards in industry agreement and finally, simply cultural and societal resistance just layer on the complexities we have to work through.
To overcome these barriers requires a very strategic thoughtful approach, putting in place robust governance structures, clear communication channels that really work and a absolute commitment to building trust, engagement and collaboration
There are many success stories emerging of organizations embracing ecosystems, gradually shifting the narrative and encouraging ecosystem-centic thinking and design, often technology led organizations such as Apple, Amazon, Salesforce, Alibaba, with its Taobao offerings as well as many others like Ikea, Patagonia, Uber, Airbnb or grouped around emerging business areas like Bio-pharma, life sciences, energy, environmental science or tackling areas like educational through collaborations and ecosystems.
We need to embrace Ecosystems
Breaking down resistance to business ecosystems does enable organizations to unlock the full potential and drive significant innovation change, build a level of adaptability radically different than how we operate today. Becoming agile and responsive does offer a really different pathway to sustained collective excellence.
EY offer a really excellent post ” Seven business models for creating ecosystem value” by Greg Sarafin of EY Partner Ecosystems, to give some real stimulation to evaluating business ecosystem models.
Also a very valuable series on practical guidance to business ecosystems has been provided by BCG, for example “What is your Business Ecosystem Strategy?”
Business organizations do need to invest thinking time and resources in exploring the value from progressively adopting an ecosystem mindset,
We are navigating more complexity than ever before, it cannot be undertaken alone, it needs a different thinking and this is where I can really help and guide you. Contact me so we can discuss how to undertake this.