@paul4innovating

Affordability versus Sustainability – a cause to be addressed

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The concept of Sustainability is still being pushed out in the future for many of us.

Why should we worry today? The “judgement” is that those Eco-friendly products seem to always be more expensive due to often unexplained or unfamiliar concepts.

As long as we can afford what we know and trust, then why worry or change? The question is, will this abundance, this acceptance that it is there, finally be changing?

Today we can’t see the value in shifting to a more sustainable pathway. We are expected to pay more for that higher cost of producing locally, growing food organically, using recycled materials, and many other factors that do add up to make a significant price difference when you compare.

We are reluctant to make the shift as it is still not compelling enough to change when we have abundant options.

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Human Ingenuity, Ecosystem Thinking, Embracing Innovation

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Today and in the future, we continue to take where we are in our technology and digital understanding and feed it more remarkable human ingenuity. Combining the collected knowledge found in a network of collaborators can dramatically advance the solutions sought by unlocking previously intractable problems.

We have entered the innovation era as we combine in ways not possible until recently. If we take any industry, any societal problem, as we tackle climate challenges, the power of connected innovation will make a difference and give us our breakthroughs.

We are still searching for the “how and what.” We need to push ourselves by opening up to the “where and why” in a network of connecting ways. We are recognizing sharing what we know accelerates understanding for all those involved.

Recognizing ecosystems are vital, combining human, technology, and data allows us to pursue multiple possibilities, explore them faster than before, evaluate them in quicker, more imaginative ways and scale those that show promise.

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Ecosystems are really important, are we correctly applying them in Business?

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I have been reading the Ecosystem Restoration Playbook – a practical guide to healing the planet, developed for World Environment Day 2021 to kick off the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021-2030)

I do like the explanation of Ecosystems, lifted from the restoration playbook (see below). There is some real contradiction to how business applies the ecosystem thinking, and this post attempts to look at the differences and implications of treating ecosystems differently. This use of “ecosystems” is degrading as much as we are in our Natural Systems, mostly in the eventual resource depletion and our insatiable consumption.

By taking this business thinking of Ecosystems into continually pushing for greater consumer consumption is a growing problem. We are at a time when we need to place a break on this, and take a different position of replenishing or restoring what we have, and reuse it. With our drive for continued growth consumption and exploitation, we are compounding our planet’s problems.

I wanted to explore some differences within Natural Ecosystems and how Business uses Ecosystems to search for growth, scale, and dominance. We are in need to change our consumption habits and business growth models.

This is not a definitive list. It is more to stop and reflect where we are heading on applying ecosystem thinking, perhaps addressing its accepted context or adapting it to fit its new one being push in the business world.

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Reshaping the core of your business through a focus on Sustainability

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If the decision is made to become more focused on “being sustainable”, drastic shifts in direction will undoubtedly occur.

The shift from that fear of being disrupted due to the digital transformation is being replaced by the need to build a sustainable company built on increasing insight and connected understanding, seeking and exploring, experimenting and confirming a new value equation.

A huge mental mindset needs to make leaps of faith and adjustments to this new order of focus.

That set of decisions will require a dedicated, focused, systematic need to assess the portfolio and the operating conditions. This goes way beyond the present “where to play and how to win”; this becomes as much for the long game as managing the short term.

The four focus points for Sustainability

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Orchestrating the New Ecosystem Business Design.

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There is a growing body of work about “orchestration” and its need in the business world. As we form a greater association with ecosystems as the business design, the orchestrator becomes central to its performance and success.

Orchestration has become synonymous with managing or dealing with (specifically) external partners. The need is to learn to cooperate to produce something different and original, usually in a platform and ecosystem arrangement.

I am continually reading about scale, modular structures, governance, the advantage of asset-light business models where the possibilities of speed and breadth of open innovation need to “kick in.” Orchestration can take on a lot, but we need to define the role a little more, in my opinion.

I often wonder if all this orchestration through ecosystem design does achieve that radical breakthrough or have become just another solution or coordinating mechanism and a convenient “tag” to attach to it to consider?

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Ecosystems offer us infinite possibilities

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The new environment providing by adopting ecosystem thinking offers us infinite possibilities. It opens us all up to new knowledge, collaboration and sources of new value and innovative impact.

We have new frontiers and unexploited opportunities everywhere when we push through today’s constraints. We have more connected hardware to open up our physical and digital realms, and thirdly we have access all the time to more real-world data than ever before—the birth of the digital and physical ecosystems that enable innovation like never before.

We have some awesome power available to us; can’t we unlock the potential to change where we seem to be heading?

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Getting Comfortable with Your Digital Twin- Origins, Purpose and Definitions

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Image from Siemens AG on their digital twin thinking, of a perpetual loop, constantly informing and improving.

I want to give a more dedicated focus on the digital twin that is becoming more dominating in our world. So I will explore these increasingly over different posts. This is the first to give a short history and explanation of digital twins before we look deeper into the role the digital twin is taking in industrial predictive applications and visualization and how this is evolving into being comprehensive in its design, allowing twins to be built on processes, products and production to relate, anticipate and simulate actual activities or physical needs.

So, where are we on understanding the value of having a digital twin? No, not yet one for ourselves but given time we will, we already have a digital twin of a heart.

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Financing Decarbonization in Energy and Infrastructure

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Siemens Smart Infrastructure Grid Edge Summit

Siemens Smart Infrastructure offers many different solutions to achieving this change at the energy grid edge. Recently, to amplify this, they have been holding a conference over two days entitled “the grid edge summit“.

You can still register here as the event is available for some time to view and explore. It would help in understanding their solutions if you visited their different energy topic areas. Here Siemens offers you a significant range of choices, solutions and advice on Grid Edge topics to give you time to check out some of the #GridEdge tech & solutions.

These topics and solutions are organized under decarbonization and sustainability, distributed energy solutions, the integration of renewable energy resources, mobility charging, and the consulting and financing solutions available to utilize. The main conference event is a series of talks and panels exploring the topics above.

One panel I particularly enjoyed was “Financing Decarbonization.”

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Sustainability is the new growth core

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Since the current COVID-19 pandemic, the recognition and evaluation of sustainability have taken a much higher place in the boardrooms of our larger organisations. Much of this initial focus will improve the reporting around the ESG goals and establish their own performance in more confident ways. I would argue these are the basic building blocks of a fundamental change, recognizing that sustainability will become the core of the future business design.

As we have embraced digital change, much of the business landscape has shifted. Business is being more informed through the data and analysis it undertakes; it has relearned how to react in sustaining crisis (dealing with the pandemic) and validated different aspects of its business, recognizing it can function very differently. The ability to manage and support remote workers, dealing with an ongoing business outside the office environment, be remote in servicing customers digitally, and provide solutions through connected enterprises’ design have each changed perception and the realization that we can sustain and still grow in more collaborative, open ways.

Sustainability is rising to be top or close to the top of a boards agenda. The growing concerns of several intertwined issues that are needing significant recalibrating. Where does our business fit within and alongside society, both in who we serve and society in general, coupled with realising that the planet is heading towards a critical crisis and what we can do to reduce these pressures?

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The New Virtual Enterprises Building Blocks

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© Copyright IBM Corporation 2021

I have to say I loved reading this from the IBM Institute for Business Value. It provides a greater fit with much of what I was struggling to articulate in a recent post “Missing the building blocks of ecosystem design in the Energy Roadmap by IEA“; I can relate to what the IBM report conveys as the future way to organize and undertake business or to bring together all the parts of the Energy System roadmap suggested in the recent IEA report.

The report “The Virtual Enterprise – The Cognitive Enterprise in a virtual world.” gives a new view to managing in both virtual worlds and enterprises. I do recommend reading it.

To quote Mark Foster, Senior Vice President, IBM Services:

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