Category Archives: Business Ecosystems

Tackling interoperability is critical to resolve

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Tackling interoperability is critical.

For nearly all business entities, the ability to fully connect up the organization across people, processes, design, structures and strategies is always a work-in-progress, never worked upon to the fullest extent and rarely achieved without the most radical transformation.

I come up against the barriers to change caught up consistently in this lack of interoperability. So I have to bring it into this exploring ecosystem and platform designs posting views.

What do we miss in not having that connectivity? Recognizing silos of unconnected knowledge needs changing; we need to leverage all of our diversity and expertise. Do you really know your capabilities, competencies and capacities?

  1. Focusing on making technology work across organizations, internally and externally, with partners that share a common purpose. Our need is to find new growth engines and, more, sustaining. business value. it is our understanding to make exchanges work to enable creativity, and we need technology across processes to talk to each other- called interoperability.
  2. Uncertainty, fear of the unknown, reluctance to share and partner, or to mutually “pool” intellectual property or our research know-how in a shared collaborative effort is hard. We often hold onto our knowledge as our “source of power”, this we need to let go of and embrace a new way of believing, trusting and collaborating. We will gain far more than we lose.
  3. We must ask the important questions and fully recognize the answer to “what do we do well? How can we leverage and build out from this?” Are we investing enough time in networking, exchanging insights or building relationships? Knowing our core capabilities, competencies, and capacities is essential.

Let’s tackle one tough one- interoperability makes or breaks much of what we struggle to do -exchange knowledge.

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Leveraging the core of what we already have

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The need to leverage our existing core first in any change

Embracing our core and leveraging these to the best of our abilities is a great place to start undertaking and preparing organizations for necessary change. This begins a journey so it is not simply efficiency we are looking for but achieving a much higher level of effectiveness to be ready to make changes ahead less disruptive.

Do you really know your capabilities, competencies and capacities?

In most cases, an organisation has a capable, familiar core – and improving the performance of this core will contribute a significant value at a lower cost and faster than introducing new tools, but the need is to understand the how, where and what.

Existing tools don’t often require being replaced by new technologies, but knowing the data flow and having greater analytics needs changing, updating and improving. Changing and improving existing processes can be much faster than introducing new approaches and tools requiring new skills.

Is this the early adopter stage for shifting towards a new Ecosystem design? Build on what you have first and then make a staged, purposeful move towards a change that is transformational, partly gained from learning from the existing first.

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Discussing with ChatGPT about Business Innovation Ecosystems, their value and progress

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ChatGPT supports extracting human knowledge through AI learning

I decided to find out what ChatCPT had as “thoughts” on both Business and Innovation Ecosystems. So in a short set of questions, these were the replies.

I have focused on Ecosystems and technology Platform understanding since 2016. I have written much of my learning here on this posting site. So far, these insights have built over 100 posts on related subjects or side issues with different degrees of influence over understanding ecosystems and platforms in their design structures and how to build them.

Business Ecosystem understanding is still emerging in the collective understanding of many business organizations. I hope, by default, they do not revert to small experiments unless in a very selective and focused way to understand certain parts of the differences that ecosystems bring.

These chats with ChatGPT are not bad; they provide a good sense of the logical structure and value of Ecosystems that I wanted to share here as a good starting point or reference for those looking to understand some of the basics around business and innovation ecosystems.

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My building blocks towards Ecosystem thinking

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Building blocks towards Ecosystem thinking and designing

Part-way through 2022, I drew up a list of my focal points in researching, stimulating my thinking and finding different validation points on my Ecosystem thinking and design approaches. In early January this year, I took a stop, more a reflective period in these past months, to deepen down even further my knowledge of Ecosystem thinking and design. I aim to achieve, even advancing, Ecosystem understanding for those interested to learn and seeking advice through direct engagements.

My main focus on Ecosystems comes from the innovation perspective. How can we finally combine all the different parts of the Innovation system into one, fully connected up and achieve a far more open design where contributors, both inside and outside organizations, can contribute as it is the diversity of experience needed today to give fresh value and impact on complex and challenging issues, We need that discovery to commercialization fully connected up to be leveraged fully in all the diversity of contributions.

Innovation in its challenges and problems has become more complex and challenging, both in solutions offered and in working out all the connected parts to provide products or services that are superior to the existing ones. The need to provide that essential “dynamic” of having customer engagement in their data, a growing network of connected partners providing their input, their exploring and experimenting so the inventor can learn and seek to improve the product or service accordingly.

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Stages of a Virtual Industrial Metaverse Learning Journey

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Viewing the stages of the Virtual Industrial metaverse journey

The Industrial Metaverse has really “announced” itself this year. For me, it accelerated in my attention once Siemens and Nvidia announced their partnership to explore the Industrial Metaverse in early July.

The announcement came at the launch of Siemens Xcelerator, a digital platform and having both announcements made at the same event had a more extensive “bang” with the more attention-grabbing one, announcing the Industrial Metaverse partnership, in my view, overshadowed the other, the Siemens Xcelerator, which forms the Siemens building block towards this industrial future and the essentials required of a digital platform to accelerate any businesses digital transformation.

“Siemens Xcelerator is an open digital business platform that will accelerate digital transformation. Now companies of all sizes can access the digital technologies to transform how they compete, collaborate and connect“- Siemens website.

Through this open digital business platform, Siemens Xcelerator is featuring and building a curated portfolio of IoT-enabled hardware and software, a powerful ecosystem of partners, and a marketplace.

The journey is moving towards the Industrial Metaverse and I see it evolving in this way

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Building the Innovation Ecosystem narrative

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Building out the Innovation Ecosystem narrative

There needs to be a fundamental shift in how we manage innovation, which needs ecosystem thinking and design. Not only in thinking and design but in how we structure its architecture, one based on platforms, open apps, and a marketplace for selection appropriate for the innovation delivery intention. This needs to be in open, highly collaborative ecosystems.

We need a better conceptual framework to build, one based on knowledge-based intelligence and well-grounded, driven by dynamic and constant interactions, events and processes, so all involved can be engaged in building solutions that have fresh impact and value within the market space identified.

My mind map of the over-arching aims of a new innovation narrative is shown below.

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Disruption is the new constant; forget the Status Quo

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credit Storyblocks.com

Our existing business organizations need to envisage a changing world full of disruption that calls for radical constant change. They need to be ready to meet different challenges that will be consistent, complex and highly challenging, require the ability to be highly adaptive, and need high levels of open collaboration.

Connected technology needs to be central to responding rapidly and enabling this more volatile world we are facing. To achieve this responsiveness, organizations need to organize around ecosystems and platform technology approaches. This approach provides the potential ability to deliver an understanding of constant change. One that recognizes it has to be part of a growing collaborating network to thrive in this highly connected, rapidly changing and challenging world.

We need to transform or be (totally) disrupted; this is where knowing your ecosystem and network comes in as the new thinking and design of how this needs to be constructed and understood.

How and where innovation fits will depend on this transforming effect.

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Dealing with growing complexity needs innovation ecosystem thinking and design

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Photo by Anna Shvets on Pexels.com

Much of business today is caught up in managing short-term change that is growing in complexity and challenges across the business world globally. There is growing leadership and employee fatigue in managing rolling crises and not being able to adequately focus on the longer term, have that space to renew and in enough time as ideally liked. Disruption has been a constant at all organisational levels to adapt and adjust to worldwide events totally out of that organization’s control.

Following the pandemic, it has been hard to regain consistency due to staffing discontinuities and displacements, sourcing of raw materials, especially from China, their intermittency in availability and the general disruption of world trade. The war in Ukraine has only added more short-term crises in switching fuels, sourcing difficulties, changing supply chain dynamics, and generally readjusting the business operations in Ukraine and Russia to highly constrained operations or the loss/withdrawal need required by sanctions.

So the challenges in the past year have been highly focused on supply chain disruptions, plugging gaps in technology solutions that can provide solutions that can offer higher flexible, agile and advanced planning and production environments. The continued needs to keep moving towards securing a more sustainable future that reflects the need to become carbon neutral; net zero has needed a far more agile and adaptive approach.

As well as encourages thinking that is building a more robust circular economy to offset the immediate shortages but builds out a waste reduction mentality and recycling approach.

Yet disruption is increasing; we are in a volatile world of constant change.

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Why Innovation Ecosystems?

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Reaching out for a new design built on collaborative building blocks of design

Following on from a series of posts on innovation ecosystems, especially a recent one, “Seeing innovation differently through ecosystem thinking and design” I outlined a need for a profound shift in the business landscape; well in my view, that time is rapidly approaching.

Why do we need to make a really necessary change?

Our present economic models, certainly in the West are so heavily debt-laden, from the effects of over-spending, supporting the Ukrainian war, and the Corvid crisis, and rightly supporting those in economic need and business difficulties.

One of the problems in economic distribution is that applying this in a top-down way is it can often not determine those in need from those who simply gain or are unable to deliver to those the adequate or appropriate support they require.

Our models of economic distribution are simply outdated or built on self-interest or self-promotion or simply enabling preservation for individual benefit and not for the ‘greater’ community.

The next few years are going to be very painful in further adjustments and polarization.

Our politicians continue the hackneyed phrase or idea, said or used so often that it has become boring and has no meaning, of the need for growth and prosperity.

I cannot see this way forward if we remain “locked” in the existing systems of self-interest, benefits being given to selected groups as rewards for support or simply to maintain the status quo.

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The necessary Plumbing, Pipework and Pumps for the Industrial Metaverse

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The stages of building out the Industrial Metaverse
The stages of building out the Industrial Metaverse taking a three-horizon approach

I had the pleasure of attending the Nvidia GTC22 event recently. Over four days, they did a good job of scrambling my brain. Take a look at some of the sessions that apply to you- amazing stuff.

I focused on the Industrial Metaverse and where it is going. It is only at the beginning of its journey, but the feast of predictions, future forecasting and bold, clear visions on this was impressive.

Jensen Huang, the NVIDIA CEO gave the keynote where he took us into that opening understanding and a closer look at the game-changing technologies that are helping us take on the world’s greatest challenges. I really had to break this nearly two-hour keynote into “bite-sized” segments to absorb all the releases, updates and the speed of development that NVIDIA are undertaking.

Rev Lebaredian, VP within the Omniverse group, gave us a clear view of how and where the Industrial Metaverse can head. NVIDIA Omniverse is the platform for future building.

The Omniverse platform is for creating and operating metaverse applications.

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