Who orchestrates or facilitates this process of building out a Business Partner Ecosystem? Is it the lead company recognizing the value of building a more robust partner ecosystem or bringing in a specialized consultancy able to facilitate the significant amount of work this usually means?
It is not just about dedicated time but about experience, understanding, and recognition of all that can potentially change when exploiting ecosystems and being adaptive enough to respond.
There are typically two main approaches to orchestrating the process of building and managing a partner ecosystem:
All around us, we are faced with new challenges and growing complexity.
We seem caught up in more wicked problems that require a profound shift relating to innovation. Increasingly, we are also witnessing growing dissatisfaction with the impact that innovation has today to overcome customer needs and provide more sustained growth, returns, market and customer impact.
One of the implications of this growing recognition is that innovation today rarely succeeds in isolation, staying within the four walls of one organization. Solutions required are becoming highly dependent on a more dependent type of complementary innovation: open, collaborative, sharing, and exchanging collectively around a given concept to take it to market. This requires business ecosystem thinking and design.
Working in Ecosystems will change the nature of business activities.
The importance of a radical mindset shift in Business Ecosystem Design
What makes Business Ecosystems different in how we approach them, the answer lies in our mindset? Are our existing ways of approaching business design different and within this, how important is a radical mindshift in any Business Ecosystem thinking?
Business ecosystems do need to be understood as radically different from how ‘we’ have undertaken the way we have “gone about our business” and think this through for the potential promise it might offer. Most businesses operate within their protected environment of designing, building, optimising and going to market. It is very singular, and everything is channelled through them.
A single entity undergoes and contract with selected suppliers and often stays with them for many good reasons, they conduct their proprietary research, build there own concepts of products and services and undertake the build to deliver internally within their selected ecosystem of stakeholders. This works and continues to function, but up to a certain point.
Today, this often silo thinking does need to be challenged and at least an initial rethink for instance about Partner Ecosystems and the value they can bring in different approaches, thinking, market offerings and mindsets does lead on to the broader adoption of Business Ecosystems. Applying a radically different collaboration thinking for co-creation can offer significant benefits, returns and rewards.
Why should we consider establishing the Hierarchy of Business Ecosystem Needs within a single organization and collaboratively between Enterprises? It is recognized today that Ecosystem design and thinking provide demonstrable value and gain.
Building the Case for the Hierarchy of Business Ecosystem Needs:
In the rapidly evolving business landscape, we face constant change and recognise complexity is rapidly becoming the norm. The hierarchy of ecosystem needs emerged from my work and studies of ecosystems as a compelling and viable alternative for organizations to consider, manage their business, and look to extend their growth and potential through the ability to open up and create in different, highly collaborative ways.
This strategic paradigm dramatically shifts individual organizations towards sustained prosperity and fosters collaborative ecosystems that amplify collective impact, knowledge exchange, value and growth potential.
