Business Ecosystems

Adjusting to the Changing Landscape of Ecosystems

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the changing landscape for ecosystem and platform thinking

We all are being told repeatedly that opportunities will increasingly emerge outside of the traditional established lines of business, as new digital technology solutions take increasing hold in our adjusting to the changing landscape of our thinking in ecosystem designs.

The issue is how we go about adapting to these and taking advantage of the changes all businesses are undergoing. These will be through different approaches to designing and extracting the potential value gained and will form around ecosystems and their management, through technology solutions provided by platform providers.

I am not sure how you feel, but It seems disruption is in everything, in what we need to undertake, in what is coming towards us in change. It has a common purpose, often far less sinister than promoted.

Disruption is requiring us to re-equip and open up, as we learn to deal in this changing world where connections can emerge from anywhere at any time, offering a new ‘line of sight’ onto an existing business concept.

We need to respond quickly and in those different, collaborative ways. Digital challenges are everywhere, to explore and exploit.

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The Future Is Within Health Ecosystems

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Source: IBM Institute for Business Value

I have struggled to get my head around the effect of ecosystems within the healthcare system; it is so complex.

In recent weeks, I have recognized the barriers and opportunities around the challenges of building ecosystems for health services to deliver real change within our healthcare and its management.

To help me, I have found some excellent observations to gain this deeper appreciation of the complexities involved. The links are shown at the bottom of this post.

This is my opening summary to relate my understanding of how ecosystem designs might help change this vital sector of our economies.

The first starting point is that the patient themselves have to become the centre of any future healthcare system, based on ecosystem solutions. Why? Firstly, the patient or customer will increasingly be demanding and expecting personalized treatment and want to be able to shop around to achieve this. Secondly, they are expecting and wanting to be part of a controlled method and choose advice and care delivery more than ever. Thirdly, they will shop for quality and cost as the cost models will increasingly look for this personalization to determine the premiums. The final customer will be central to drive the change, and the providers of ‘services’ keen to reposition themselves as responsive to this ‘need.’

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Blockchain and distributed ledgers as innovative platforms

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It had to come to this eventually.  The emergence of Blockchain and distributed ledger systems illustrates how innovation is moving from focus on products and services, which are interesting but don’t provide a long-lasting competitive advantage, to a focus on platforms and ecosystems.

Over the last few weeks this need for a lasting competitive shift in focus was emphasized as Ford pushed out its CEO because he wasn’t changing the company fast enough. As discussed in this blog previously, the automotive sector must rethink its competitive position.  Increasingly, people want flexible transportation – from cabs, Uber, public transportation and/or their cars.

The automotive manufacturers (Ford, GM, Fiat, Mercedes, etc) must shift their focus from building physical cars to providing transportation – a shift in thinking and strategy.

In a very similar manner we can see that banking and financial services are moving from offering discrete services (mortgages, loans, checking/savings accounts, etc) and are considering how to either own or integrate with larger platforms and ecosystems, because the older conventions are less attractive to emerging customers and technology is advancing so quickly that soon many different companies and industries can offer banking-like services.

Distributed ledgers and Blockchain may point out a new competitive platform that some firm is going to capitalize on.  For example, we can imagine a time in the not too distant future where a large company that supports and relies on an extended supply chain – the automotive industry for example – could dictate that all of its supply chain participants must interact using Blockchain.  Then we’d have a company spanning, industry wide ERP like platform.  If this sounds crazy, don’t laugh.  The government of Dubai just announced that within five years every entity that interacts with the government must do so using Blockchain.

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So Let’s Take the Autonomous Car in the Wider Ecosystem Perspective

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Image Credit: Rinspeed

My collaborative colleague here on this website, Jeffrey Phillips, recently wrote a piece on his own blogging site “What autonomous cars tell us about the future of innovation.”  I could not resist picking up on this by taking a broader ecosystem perspective to autonomous vehicles and all the mounting “unintended consequences,” many yet to be fully worked through.

We tend to focus always on the innovation promises of new growth and achieving a clearer competitive advantage, yet we often ‘gloss over’ or push issues and problems onto others to resolve, it is often that innovation has many “unintended consequences”.

Many “unintended consequences” are often very unfortunate and we so often fail to see the consequences, many times our capabilities run ahead of our foresight.Casual maps or cognitive mapping can help reduce these.

We often fail to recognize the “connected system” as we focus on our narrower objectives and fail to fully appreciate the primary objectives of others or the impact this might have. We need to take more of the ‘wider system’ approach into consideration as it might highlight missed opportunities but equally, consequences can have a higher impact cost than expected that allows one part of this wider ecosystem to gain increased value and return but for many others will have a higher knock-on economic cost.

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Many-to-Many (M2M) Business Ecosystems are far more challenging

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Our experiences determine to a large degree, success or failure. When you are reliant on others to collaborate and exchange knowledge, for the better good, you need to make sure there is a consistent validation process.

Building the multi-sided solutions where an ecosystem of providers is collectively working towards finding solutions that radically advance on existing ones, you have to enter these type of relationships with your eyes wide open, they are extremely hard and demanding.

They are complex in their relationships, collaborating and exchanging knowledge and expertise to get to a given ‘transformation’ point. You have to become adaptive.

They are differences in the different types of business platforms and who engages with whom and where they enter the value building chain. In my last post “Seeing differences between B2C and B2B within Ecosystems and Platforms” I covered the major differences between them.

Here in this post, I explore the considerable differences between ones that are one-to-many in the relationship that most of our digital platform solutions have been evolving into (B2B, B2C) and many-to-many. The complexity rises to a very different level.

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Entering new battlegrounds of connected devices

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There is a new set of battlegrounds brewing around platforms and ecosystems and what and who controls the data and the flows needed to build these thriving environments, reliant on the cloud.

One such battle zone will be on connected devices and who controls and delivers what.

It is not unlike the battleground of the mobile phone device that became famous in an internal note to Nokia employees that I wrote about, back in 2011 “Welcome to the brave new world of innovation ecosystems”.

We are coming to the time that will have similar high stakes of who thrives (and survives) by what they own or control in the looming battles ahead, the one of who and what connects and the way these connections generate, influence and control the connectivity required; to connect the ‘intelligent’ devices to platforms, clouds and all the partners in the ecosystem, seeking insight and understanding to exploit and explore new efficiency and growth opportunities, collecting the new gold called ‘fluid data’.

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The Interconnected Parts of an Ecosystem

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Credit Katri Valkokari

Now I relate very strongly to different visuals and this happens to be a current favorite of mine. It sums up the differences between the types of ecosystems we need to recognize and work through.

I came across this in a paper by Katri Valkokari, a Research Manager at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland in the Business, Innovation and Foresight research area.

Although it presses a number of buttons for me, the paper seems to have limited the differences shown here and I just want to throw this visual open just a little more, in your ‘need to know’ here and then come back to it later.

What Katri does, is provide a really good contribution into how they differ in outcomes, interactions, even a logic of actions and the different ‘actor’ roles for the three.

A return to thinking Ecosystems and Platforms

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Nurturing the Network Effect of Firms within Innovation Ecosystems.

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nurturing-the-ecosystem
The Network Effect for Ecosystem Designs

We are forming in many different ways our greater collection of relationships that matter to each organization, by connecting increasingly in a network of potential partners and collaborators.

The goals are so as to deliver innovative products and services that would not be able to be delivered by only having just the one organization attempting it.

Managing this growing form of innovation complexity is challenging old theories, boundaries, organizations and how they exist going forward.

Ecosystem innovation is more today about managing beyond the immediate known’s found within one organization’s limited focus of the world, they are exploring many of the unknowns that need discovery and then connection.

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