Taking an ecosystem approach. highly collaborative and networked opens up the potential for a more sustainable future

We have new frontiers and unexploited opportunities everywhere when we push through today’s constraints and tackle growing complex challenges.

We have more connected hardware to open up our physical and digital realms, applying technology and human ingenuity. We all have access to more real-world data than ever before—giving us the birth of the digital and physical ecosystems that enable innovation like never before.

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

We have entered a new innovation era as we combine in ways not possible until recently. If we take any industry or any societal problem as we tackle climate challenges, it is the power of connected innovation to make a difference and give us our breakthroughs. We have the tools to tackle big (and stubbornly small) challenges in collective environments and the incentives to build our relationships and networks that want to combine and collaborate to solve problems and advance solutions.

Ecosystems will change the nature of business activities. Let me take four of these:

• Ecosystems will have the potential to expand capabilities and enable experiences beyond anything possible today in the present world that most of our business organizations operate in, ones that are operating in their own ‘disconnected’ world, internally focused, constrained by limited technology connection and resources.
• Ecosystems open up the world. They connect it for richer access to diversity and different sets of discoveries not possible within one organization’s current capabilities or capacities. It is highly collaborative and interactive.
• Gaining a network of thriving relationships. This very nature of opening up, interacting, and building a growing relationship interdependence is driving the new innovation potential. One is looking to create and explore new greater business value by acting and collaborating together, having a position appreciating common and shared goals, which offers the potential for outcomes to be greater than the sum of the individual parts.
• An urgent need to coalesce around complex challenges. As our world becomes more complex, ecosystems offer ways to coalesce around those sorts of challenges, bringing together within the ecosystem community the potential to build, solve, share and exchange goals and concepts that help solve these complexities,  achieved in highly collaborative ways.

Recognizing ecosystems is vital; combining humans, technology, and data allows us to pursue multiple possibilities, explore them faster than before, evaluate them in quicker, smarter ways and scale those that show promise for all of us to be more efficient, considerate and respectful of finite resources. Ecosystem designs allow us to undergo a change from individualism to revaluing community and supporting each other in resourceful ways, and respecting all that is around us needs to be more balanced.

We can search for and build entirely new capabilities by connecting technology and different people.

The power of ecosystems can allow us to innovate differently, be more designed for a sustainable future, be highly collaborative and be networked.

We need a new way to work in highly collaborative ecosystems, so different from our past.