Conclusion
Disclaimer: This article is published in partnership with Siemens. Siemens is paying for my engagement, not for promotional purposes. Opinions are my own
Category Archives: Ecosystems
Siemens launches Xcelerator for navigating the digital transformation
Siemens Xcelerator the new Digital Business Platform, launched 29th July 2022
Today, 29th June 2022, Siemens launched Siemens Xcelerator across its entire portfolio to accelerate digital transformation and value creation for customers of all sizes in industry, buildings, grids and mobility. The business platform makes digital transformation easier, faster and scalable.
Xcelerator is an open digital business platform, that will enable hardware, software and digital services from across all of Siemen’s portfolios and also will bring in certified third parties, to provide a growing ecosystem of partners, provide an evolving marketplace to accelerate the digital transformation and provide interactions and transactions between customers, partners and developers. The really big story is the moving toward an Industrial Metaverse through the power of this Xcelerator platform and its future potential in a new exciting partnership with NVIDIA.
This is a step-by-step transformational journey
Roland Busch, President and CEO of Siemens AG remarked Xcelerator “is the logical next step in the implementation of our digitalization strategy to enable even faster innovation and value creation. Siemens Xcelerator brings the power of our focused technology company together with a thriving ecosystem of technology partners. We are joining together to simplify digital transformation so that customers of all sizes can benefit at speed and scale.”
He went on to state “Siemens Xcelerator will make it easier than ever before for companies to navigate digital transformation – faster and at scale. By combining the real and the digital worlds across operational and information technology, we empower customers and partners to boost productivity, competitiveness and scale up innovations.”
“Our leading portfolio is transformed towards more open applications, with more cloud-based and as-a-service solutions and IoT-enabled hardware that can be constantly upgraded. At the same time, the collaboration will reach a new level with a growing ecosystem of partners.”
Building the sustainable industrial innovation pathway
So, what makes industries more sustainable, more responsive and adaptive? How can we build a sustainable industrial capability?
We have entered a far more volatile set of market conditions. Industrial companies are searching for ways to accelerate their digital transformation to keep up with changing demands, managing the increasing complexity and reacting to supply chain challenges.
We are facing up to some of the most significant challenges of our time. Dealing with climate change, we urgently need to rapidly decarbonize in a world where the global industrial sector accounts for 20-30% of global carbon emissions and 1/3 of global energy use.
The imperative is transforming industry towards a greater need to build out a sustainable future as critical to tackling decarbonization in highly collaborative ways through the combination of technology and human ingenuity. Continue reading
Designing a new business ecosystem for greater innovation
The three critical ecosystems combine for sustaining business advantage
Today’s challenge is to build the organizational capacities to be different, sustained and accelerate the critical aspect that innovation, ingenuity and creativity can provide and make sure they are equipped for supporting lasting, sustainable growth that comes from a purposefully designed business ecosystem.
Applying ecosystem thinking offers you the collaborative ability to extend beyond more traditional channels of delivery, often just restricted to only utilizing your existing infrastructure, sales channels and networks of partners. Building a more open business ecosystem allows you to search and build on others’ specialization into that “greater” innovation potential.
Today to set about and build a business ecosystem, the significant application and the use of technology, the cloud and a diverse set of collaborations will increasingly become the mainstream for innovation inputs, accelerants, and the delivery of value. Continue reading
Gearing up for sustainability in business is becoming core
Sustainability is the new growth core in business change
Sustainability is near the very top or close to the top of any forward-looking board’s agenda. The board is recognizing the growing concerns of several “intertwined issues” that are needing significant recalibrating and is forcing them to think beyond asking “how can we thrive and survive, into how can we build a sustainable pathway for value, growth and impact?”.
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. Today, we need to account for the impacts of heat, flooding, water shortages, health and food issues and what we can do to reduce these pressures? How can each of us make a contribution to becoming more sustainable?
There are growing impact points that are harder to separate, they are increasingly becoming intertwined. The economy for a business to function and be profitable, an environment that is climate and nature friendly and thirdly, the growing considerations for a broader range of people to serve, support or inform the social and corporate values come increasingly together.
We live in a connected world mutually dependent on nature, our environment, in sharing and valuing that we only thrive and survive if we collaborate and cooperate. Continue reading
The combination effect of ecosystems, platforms, marketplaces and portfolios
Combination effect of combining ecosystems, platforms, marketplaces and portfolios into the organizations future thinking and design
Today we need a completely different type of thinking for designing our business future, one that is highly collaborative, a design thinking approach, to give the “combination effect” of ecosystems, platforms, marketplaces and portfolios.
We need to recognize the value of taking an Ecosystem thinking and design approach.
For far too long business organizations have been trapped in their own silos of thinking and collaborating, achieving only their one perspective of what a market or their customers need
Often this relied on time-consuming research or focus groups and the outcomes were often flawed as the sample size was too small, the market dynamics were evolving and shifting and research of this nature often lags. Also, often executives operate at a significant distance from the market itself to lose that essential contact.
Equally, to quantify the research you often had to make given assumptions or have more advanced prototypes to show and gauge the reaction and thinking. This tended to take you back into a loop of the redesign adding further conflicting views and opinions.
Today we can’t afford such a layered, sequential, and linear system as the competition has become faster, it comes from any point of the globe and advances at a pace it is hard to track and respond to without a highly adaptive, responsive business model design.
We still talk of fast followers and laggards but this has one dangerous assumption, we all want to be like each other and that, will eventually spin us into the race to the bottom. Continue reading
Ecosystems and Platforms, the new collaborative business need.
Today business organizations are having to face the stark truth, either they adapt or die. If they adapt they accept a need for a radical redesign to extend their organization’s ability to open up in highly collaborative thinking ways. Today there is a real need to seek out higher impact and value opportunities to build a more sustainable business future.
“We are in the era of ecosystem and platforms to be central to our business future”
Changing how organizations have been structured and designed into something different, ones that are open, highly collaborative and sharing ideas and concepts with others to build more sustaining, value-adding business solutions is a significant change that needs to be contemplated and addressed.
It needs bold leadership to undertake a significant transformational journey. Technology offers them the transforming means but can they, as leaders, take their people with them?
Here is why they must: Continue reading
Building trust in community relationships offers much
Trust, dialogues and relationships often lead to new breakthrough ideas
There is a realization today, far more than in the past, that greater trust in relationships builds not just from projecting forward aspirations and values, but also in gaining a greater community involvement.
This greater community involvement often leads to new collaborative breakthrough ideas not possible without this open sharing.
For example, if a business addresses its environmental footprint and works to change its social impact in ways to protect our planet it gains clear identification and association.
Trust comes from connecting shared values and providing the narrative of how this journey will be undertaken and asking others to help build this in collaborative engagement and shared platforms. Continue reading
The Constantly Living Dynamics of Ecosystem Governance Always Needed
Ecosystems will change the nature of business activities. Here are four of these but they need the beating heart of Governance to be pulsing through them by taking an evolving, living dynamic governance approach.
Ecosystems can lead to four distinct value-adding opportunities
- 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.
- It is by this very nature of opening up and interacting building a growing interdependence in relationships, that is driving the new innovation potential. As one is looking to create and explore new business value by willing collaborators acting together, that offers potential for outcomes to be greater than the sum of the individual parts.
- As our world becomes more complex, ecosystems offer ways to coalesce around those sorts of growing, seemingly complicated challenges, that bring 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.
One of the most critical aspects of a thriving ecosystem comes from recognizing that Governance needs to be highly dynamic, constantly evolving as the inner heart of a good Ecosystem.
Distinctive Governance Challenges that keep evolving.
Continue reading
The viability of building out sustaining business ecosystems and platforms
The viability of building sustaining business Ecosystems
Ecosystems and platforms are the present way to build your business or so we are advised. Yet there is ahead of us potentially the evolving way we take the Metaverse, this might be on the future horizon to take ecosystem thinking into a new direction.
Let’s see will metaverses take our present ecosystem thinking beyond? A metaverse is all the connections between the financial, virtual, and physical worlds that are becoming increasingly linked.
In many ways, the metaverse will combine all aspects of life in one place and become far more of our future platforms. There are commonalities between existing language and practice and the metaverse can extend this out.
For instance in reality, virtually, immersive, in marketplace offerings, in building a stronger blockchain element, having a greater social or customer participation. Marketplaces can decentralize even further what we have, we can interact differently, having more options to stimulate or be creative, and we will continue to build out interoperability and accessibility.
All of this is a “promise yet to come” but not so far away not to consider where the Metaverse might take ecosystem and platform practice into our present thinking.
Stepping back from the promise of what might yet come Continue reading
Siemen’s industrial partner vision builds on three waves of engagement
The power of the Siemens industrial partner ecosystem is in having partners combining their domain expertise, with the Digital Enterprise portfolio of Siemens to solve real-world challenges and create value for customers.
Building a powerful industrial partner ecosystem
How do you set about building an open, inclusive ecosystem that enables global knowledge sharing and open collaboration?
A fascinating session held at Hannover Messe 2022 by Siemens was entitled “Master digital transformation and accelerate business value through a powerful industrial Partner Ecosystem”, bringing together representatives of a solution group, moving towards 2,000 solution partners, that work within the platform provided by Siemens.
The concept provides an ecosystem approach that combines different partner expertise to tackle and support the digital transformation needed to break down silos and think well beyond the walls of the present customers’ current configuration within their factories to turn them into a Digital Enterprise.
The forum’s design is an open, highly collaborative way to solve problems, resolve challenges and build out a customer’s environment to benefit from the connected solutions that technology enablement brings.
The concept is to build on what each partner has already gained from their experience and expertise, delivered to their customers, to share and provide services and technology solutions to different Siemens customers that bring them higher business value and impact.