Category Archives: Ecosystems

Needing three distinct Ecosystems within any Business Design

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I believe ecosystems are the new organism of the business world to innovative, network, and connect. Organize these correctly and you have a really powerful collaborative force

The three ecosystems of knowledge, innovation, and business mutually reinforce each other, it is all their interacting parts, their interdependence to each other, and how one part fits and reacts with the others, gives this great power.

We need to recognize business ecosystems are emerging as a real competitive force?

We all need to recognize that the world is changing. It is a highly connected one, built on some incredible technological advances. What is emerging as crystal clear, is that the single industry and one business-specific approach are seeing massive change, are being placed increasingly under threat of not even surviving. We require different business models to compete and it is through an ecosystem design you can extract greater value. Continue reading →

Creating A Unique Nested Hydrogen Ecosystem for the Energy Transformation

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Ecosystems hold a particular fascination for me. The ecosystem approach has the potential to tackle and help resolve some of the more complex issues we face.

We increasingly are using the word “ecosystem” to describe our environment that we operate within, but often we are diluting its accurate positioning or understanding.

Indeed unique ecosystems are hard to find and certainly to manage. One I really feel reflects a collaborative model worth explaining is the ones that are forming around Hydrogen as the alternative energy vector based on renewables. To replace or become a significant part of any entrenched energy system requires a system design approach. This part of the energy transition fits within the ‘greater’ energy system design.

Let’s look at this with some context and then the clarification that approaching Hydrogen needs a unique Ecosystem design. We are presently building a unique ‘nested’ Hydrogen Ecosystem within the Energy Transition, and it is interesting to explore, firstly, here and then in a follow-up post on one of its specific parts, the Hydrogen Council. Continue reading →

Designing Ecosystems in Health Understanding

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Understanding any health issue is complicated enough, in how a doctor works through the alternatives as a “pattern recognition” when someone sick seeks help.  The diagnostic process is a complex transition process that begins with the patient’s personal illness history to achieve a result that can be categorized so solutions can then be applied.

A patient consulting the doctor about his symptoms starts an intricate process that may label him, classify his illness, indicate certain specific treatments in preference to others, and put him in a prognostic category.

The outcome of the process is regarded as essential for effective treatment by both patient and doctor(1). It is seen as “the clustering of signs and their development over time is, in narrative theory, defined as the plot, with this plot, eventually becoming the diagnosis.

Taking health systems higher into whole health systems

When you take health systems higher, into a design of a whole health system, the complexity becomes a magnitude of order to sort out that is way up there, in a different league. We struggle to find ways to capture whole health systems, perhaps until now.

There are so many gaps in our health system, to the point we are often just plugging parts thinking they are improving the system.  Actually, the opposite is often true, we produce a ‘knock-on’ effect that depreciates the system to make it less effective progressively over time or in surprising sudden fashion. This progressive decline comes partly from not understanding the complete Health Ecosystem you are in. We need to think about designing Health Systems in Ecosystem ways.

It is argued our health systems are failing as they do not address the “whole” health ecosystem, as we only tend to treat part of the system. The doctor is looking to cure the immediate issue, applying solutions that are often grouped as generative but in his judgment applicable to your need.

The question we all face there are significant gaps as the system really is one-sided, it is looking for speedy outcomes, and to limit the cost. This is a solution-providers need but is it coving the patient’s side by delivering value in one that offers affective capacity. Affective here refers to the underlying affective experience of feeling, emotion, or mood, both in its physical and mental capacity to influence and produce lasting change but also to provide a better health system focused on outcomes that work for the system providers and the patients’ perspectives delivering value to both.

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Responding to the corona virus outbreak- a Network Approach, offered by McKinsey

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Copyright © 2020 McKinsey & Company. All rights reserved.

McKinsey has been providing a couple of valuable articles on the coronavirus and offers up some thought leadership and business suggestions as we recognize the challenge this brings across the globe, in societies, and in business

Although they are providing the suggestion that leaders exhibit five leadership practices, it is the very first one that catches my eye. It is the setting up of a network and allowing it to be the response team to the pandemic and how the specific company is handling it. Continue reading →

Let’s Create and Rejuvenate with Ecosystems

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Credit Tatiana Plakhova @ complexitygraphics.com

Ecosystems are under-deployed or even misunderstood in business. Ecosystems are certainly growing in our jargon to describe something we think we want to achieve, but we fail to recognize many of its functioning aspects or needs to realize it. It is being offered simply as a buzzword.

The business ecosystem is an important business model you can deploy if you are having higher levels of complexity and growing uncertainty, and let’s be honest who doesn’t today? It can also be a way to reach out and have engagement and traction (Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, etc.)

When you are in the pursuit of having the best highly coordinated and geared to optimize performance such as a global supply chain, it is the complexity and integration that needs governance and the utmost attention to the detail and the flows. These are brilliant to “shave” costs, time and are working in predictable market conditions. Continue reading →

The battle of the energy ecosystems

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We are currently locked into a ‘battle of ecosystems.’ where our very existence is requiring one side to win, it simply must, to be more dominant.

This ecosystem battle is between those that are highly vested in the fossil-based energy supply system of today and those that are forcing change into a more renewable reliant energy system as quickly as possible.

We are pushing so much of the principles and theories of ecosystems to the maximum test in the outcomes we wish to achieve, in the energy transition we require.

We are determining our future planet and what defines a healthy ecosystem in a very ad-hoc, self-determining way. The ambitions of so many vested interests need fresh evaluations in any new socio-economic structure. We must bring these two competing energy views into a balance. A balance that allows the planet to return to one where we, as humans, can be more in harmony with all that is around us, in the air we breathe, in sharing this earth in its diversity of resources, living creatures, and what it offers in natural wonder. Continue reading →

A dark day for the climate and the fight over global warming?

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Sadly, yesterday, 4th November 2019, the United States began the process of withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, notifying the UN of its intention to leave.

The notification starts a one-year process of exiting the global climate change accord, culminating the day after the 2020 US election.

The Paris agreement brought together 188 nations to combat climate change. The Paris accord agreed in 2015, committed the US and 187 other countries to keep rising global temperatures below 2C above pre-industrial levels and attempting to limit them even more, to a 1.5C rise. Climate change, or global warming, refers to the damaging effect on the atmosphere of gases, or emissions, released from industry and agriculture.

In a publication “The Paris Climate Agreement versus the Trump Effect: Countervailing Forces for Decarbonisation,”  IIEA Senior Fellow Joseph Curtin argues that the “Trump Effect” has created a powerful countervailing force acting against the momentum which the Paris Agreement on climate change hoped to generate. The real concern is that this decision will give instability and uncertainty until broader and deeper structural factors within the US political economy can be addressed as their (the USA) issues around energy resourcing, infrastructure, and urbanization are as much in crisis as anyone else. Can this national determination by the present administration go against the tide of so many? Continue reading →

The Orchestration Role in Any Business Ecosystem Design

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This visual has held my attention for a reasonable time. It deals, in my mind, with orchestration well for reflecting the managing of a business ecosystem and how to organize the partners and parts within this.

Although its original intention was a digital orchestration, it tells the story for any orchestration of platforms or working within ecosystems that a business needs to manage.

Here, the model is a singular operating model, but applying it to a collaborative environment has most of the essential components that need true orchestrating.

There is a growing body of work about “orchestration” and its need in the business world. Orchestration has become synonymous with managing or dealing with (specifically) external partners. The need is to learn to cooperate to produce something different and original, usually in a platform and ecosystem arrangement.

I am continually reading about scale, modular structures, governance, the advantage of asset-light business models where the possibilities of speed and breadth of open innovation need to “kick in.” Orchestration can take on a lot, but we need to define the role a little more, in my opinion.

I often wonder if all this orchestration through ecosystem design does achieve that radical breakthrough or have become just another solution or coordinating mechanism and a convenient “tag” to attach to it to consider? Continue reading →

Are You Struggling with Technology Evolution and New Designs?

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I have been struggling with a fair amount on a repositioning within my business offering. I think firstly, that innovation has become digital innovation and that is one space I need to keep going towards. Not only in understanding all of the implications of this shift but in my own capability building, to deliver more support to this significant change we are undergoing, through so much technology connecting up all of the innovation “pieces,” from insight triggering, to final delivery of the finished design.

The other focus area is continuing to extend out my approach and understanding of the growing importance of platforms and ecosystems within a business. They form the future approach to build a thriving and sustainable business.

My questions recently have been where is my fit in this thinking or supporting platforms and ecosystems, beyond what I am presently doing?

The visual shown above is attempting to frame this for me. There are four critical aspects of platforms and ecosystems that need to be shaped. Let me explain:

Continue reading →

The confusing world of IIoT platforms needs to change in 2019

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I feel 2019 will be a make or break year for the platform providers for IIoT solutions. We are getting a real sense of clarity on who is leading the pack, who is struggling to keep up and some becoming real laggards, that need to change their game dramatically to stay in the platform hunt.

Clients need to come off their fence in where to invest and make some defining I(I)oT decisions. Yet to allow this to take place we need a far greater clarity of the value and real positioning of the platform providers. We need to extract the real business value understanding and ditch all the “hype” that is drowning out the real understanding. Ditch the noise, increase the signal

When you look at this top fifteen provides you can break them out between those coming from the industrial solution providers (Siemens, Schneider Electric, Bosch, GE Digital, Hitachi) and those coming from a technology conglomerate positioning  (AWS, Microsoft) those that are well known for specialised offering in technology solutions (IBM, SAP, Oracle, Cisco, Atos) and those that give perhaps greater specialised IoT focus in their business model (Software AG, PTC,C3 IoT)

How do you choose between these for your own solutions?

One thing enterprises struggling with is who to go with, that committing too, longer-term. Let us not forget, it is not one, it is a selection of those platform providers that when combined will offer you solutions to a significant part of your solution need. Partly, the decisions considers does depend on which industry you are in, the type of solutions you are looking towards to solve, so as resolve your biggest problems in your digital transformation. Also, you have to consider the technology providers you have built a history with, often equally caught up in legacy issues, or those you determine will be best at managing your cloud and edge issues (management, storage, analysis, remote connections) going forward. Continue reading →