Over the past decade, industrial companies have been forced to confront a new strategic reality: value no longer emerges inside the enterprise or inside a single domain. It emerges between them — in the flows, interactions, and governance structures that connect grids, renewables, storage, hydrogen, industry, digital, and AI.

This is the shift I’ve been analysing through the IIBE lens — a structural architecture that reveals how ecosystems actually work, where advantage forms, and why some companies compound value while others stall. In a series of posts during February I looked at four of the leading Industry / Energy players and focused in one “Who is really winning the industrial Ecosystem race?“ through one of the Intelligent Integrated Business Ecosystem (IIBE) and its Lens.

The IIBE Lens is a way of explaining Ecosystems for organizations that provides an understanding of their maturity, health and appeal, as well as providing comparisons in their competitive field. It builds out different ecosystem approaches to show value, weakness and further opportunities, applying Ecosystem thinking and design applications.

The IIBE lens provides recommended changes that would help and point to where the “drag” in your Ecosystem design is starting to cost you or allow your competitors opportunity to provide solutions you could easily be focusing upon or have overlooked or, as in GE’s case not considered to be part of your overarching solution design.

Looking through the IIBE Lens allows organizations to:

1. Understand Market Alignment: Evaluate how effectively your ecosystem meets the needs of key customer segments and emerging markets.
2. Assess Partner and Platform Strength: See which parts of your ecosystem attract partners and drive adoption.
3. Compare Competitors: Recognize how peers orchestrate their ecosystems and where gaps or advantages lie.
4. Inform Strategic Decisions: Use clear insights to prioritize investments, partnerships, and internal capabilities.

GE Vernova needs to make some decisions around Ecosystems

GE Vernova has emerged from one of the most turbulent periods in industrial history with renewed focus, sharper identity, and a clear mission: lead the energy transition. The company has the assets, the expertise, and the global footprint to do exactly that.

But there is a structural challenge holding GE Vernova back — one that technology alone cannot solve.

Both the energy and industrial transition is no longer a technology race.. They are an ecosystem race.

Grid modernisation, renewables integration, storage optimisation, hydrogen scaling, industrial electrification, and AI‑enabled operations all depend on coordination across actors that no single company controls. The winners in this landscape are not the ones with the best turbines or the most advanced digital tools. They are the ones with the architecture to orchestrate complexity.

This is where GE Vernova is exposed.

The legacy of Predix still casts a long shadow. Predix didn’t fail because the idea was wrong — it failed because GE tried to build a platform without first designing the ecosystem it was meant to enable. The technology came before the architecture. The platform came before the roles, flows, governance, and incentives that make an ecosystem work.

Today, GE Vernova is facing the same structural challenge, but at a much higher strategic altitude. Competitors are moving fast with ecosystem logic:

Siemens with Xcelerator, Schneider with EcoStruxure + AVEVA, ABB with electrification + automation + robotics, Enel with its energy transition ecosystem. They are building coherence across domains. They are designing governance. They are orchestrating partners. They are creating compounding value.

When you look at GE Vernova through this IIBE lens, a clear pattern emerges. I would sum it up as “Purpose Led, Ecosystem still forming, whereas their Strategic intent is clear; ecosystem maturity is not“. The IIBE Outcome was GE Vernova is directionally aligned with ecosystem thinking, but remains early in ecosystem maturity.

GE Vernova has the assets, the expertise, and the global footprint to lead the energy transition.
But it is missing the top‑layer architecture that turns those strengths into a coherent, intelligent ecosystem.

The next phase for GE Vernova is not another platform.
It is not another digital initiative.
It is not another reorganisation.

It is the creation of a unified ecosystem architecture — a structural operating logic that sits above platforms, products, and partners and turns them into a single, intelligent system.

• * This is not a technology problem.
  * It is not a platform problem.
  * It is an architecture problem.

Where GE Vernova is strong

• Deep domain expertise across grid, renewables, storage, and industry
• Global customer relationships
• Strong engineering and operational capabilities
• A renewed strategic focus after years of restructuring

These are real advantages, yet they are not being fully leveraged through an Ecosystem approach

Where GE Vernova is exposed

When compared to Siemens, Schneider, ABB, Enel, and other ecosystem‑driven players, GE Vernova shows three structural weaknesses:

1. No unifying ecosystem architecture
Competitors are building coherence across domains.
GE Vernova is still operating with domain silos and product logic.

2. Partners cannot align around GE
Because there are no structural roles, no designed governance, and no shared intelligence flows.

3. AI and digital cannot scale
Not because the technology is weak, but because the ecosystem architecture is missing.

This is the same structural gap that made Predix impossible to scale — not a failure of vision, but a failure of architecture. The platform came before the ecosystem. The technology came before the roles, flows, and incentives that make an ecosystem work.

Why this matters now

The energy transition is accelerating.
The complexity is increasing.
And the companies that are pulling ahead are the ones that can orchestrate actors they do not control.

GE Vernova is competing in a system where no one wins alone — and where the absence of ecosystem architecture is now a competitive liability.

What GE Vernova needs next

– Not another platform.
– Not another digital initiative.
– Not another reorganisation.

GE Vernova needs a structural operating logic — a top‑layer architecture that binds platforms, partners, AI, and sustainability into a single, coherent, intelligent system.

This is the work of the Intelligent Integrated Business Ecosystem (IIBE):
a top‑layer architecture that makes ecosystems diagnosable, designable, and orchestratable.
It is the missing structural layer GE Vernova needs to compete in the energy transition.

GE Vernova has a choice to make. The choice should be simple:
Architect your ecosystem. Or be orchestrated by others.

The companies that adopt this architecture will lead the next decade.

The post GE Vernova and the Architecture Gap: What’s Holding Back a Potential Leader in the Energy Transition? first appeared on Your Ecosystem Design Hub.

Northvolt didn’t just run out of money. It ran out of ways to change direction.

For a few years, Northvolt carried far more than a balance sheet. It carried Europe’s story about itself: that the continent could still build strategic industries, secure its own energy future, and turn circularity from a slide into a system. Then, in less than two years, that story went from European flagship to bankruptcy proceedings and asset sales. The mission didn’t suddenly become wrong. The architecture ran out of room to move when the future stopped cooperating.

This is not a post about Northvolt’s management. It is an article about what happens when ecosystem ambition scales faster than the operating system needed to keep it coherent – especially when optionality and volatility stop being theoretical and start showing up in the numbers. In plain terms, that is just how much room to move your design still leaves you, and how quickly the world forces you to use it. Looked at through that lens, Northvolt is a textbook case of ecosystem entrapment: a design that gradually traded away future freedom for speed and scale.

When the story still worked

On paper, Northvolt did many of the “right” things.

It didn’t position itself as a lone battery producer, but as the industrial centre of a European battery ecosystem:

• Automakers as anchor partners (original equipment manufacturers, OEMs), with equity, joint ventures and long-term off-take.
• Utilities and grid players providing renewable power and infrastructure.
• Recyclers closing material loops.
• Regions and governments competing to host plants, train workforces, and subsidise capital.
• Public and private finance underwriting billions on the promise of a sovereign, circular value chain.

If you only look at how the system was configured, the story was impressive: the right partners, strong demand signals, a compelling narrative around climate and sovereignty, and a clear place in Europe’s industrial playbook.

From that vantage point, the ecosystem looked fit:

• The intent was coherent: green, regional, circular batteries.
• The platform role was clear: a European anchor around which OEMs and policymakers could plan.
• Customer pull appeared strong: order books, public commitments, political backing.
• Governance structures – contracts, joint ventures, alliances – were visible and active.
• The market fit was obvious: electric vehicle (EV) penetration rising, pressure to de‑risk supply chains, political demand for “made in Europe” capacity.

If you stop the film there, you would call this a success story in the making. The uncomfortable truth is that ecosystems can look exemplary on paper and still be quietly running out of ways to adapt.

Where the design quietly ran out of future

The problem was not that the visible ecosystem was weak. The problem was that the design had very little future freedom built in once the easy future disappeared.

Northvolt effectively committed to one trajectory:

• Multiple gigafactories in parallel, rather than sequencing scale after operational excellence.
• Deep, volume‑heavy off-take commitments that assumed yield, quality and timing would converge quickly enough.
• A product mix that leaned heavily on automotive cells, with other segments treated more as extensions than as designed fallbacks.

There were few clearly pre‑designed options that answered questions like:

• “What if EV demand grows, but slower and more unevenly than the slide deck assumed?”
• “What if capital becomes expensive and policy support fragments?”
• “What if we discover this is far harder to industrialise than we wanted to believe?”

Optionality in this sense is not an abstract financial term. It’s the concrete list of moves you still have when your first bet starts to fray: shrink, re‑sequence, pivot segments, refocus geography, transfer modules to partners, or temporarily narrow the mission without losing the core. Volatility is everything that makes those moves necessary sooner than you hoped: demand whiplash, policy swings, cost shocks, and execution surprises.

Northvolt’s architecture treated those conditions as edge cases. Reality treated them as the main plot. Northvolt didn’t just run out of capital; it ran out of ways to change direction without breaking the system it had built. That is what option debt looks like at ecosystem scale.

When the future moved and the system couldn’t

The future that Northvolt was built on changed in four ways at once.

First, capital. Money became more demanding and less patient. Each new GWh of capacity became more expensive to finance, and “build it and they will come” stopped being a sufficient argument. The ecosystem design had committed most of the available capital to fixed assets and obligations, with little held back as dry powder or redesign capacity.

Second, demand. EV adoption continued, but with more volatility, regional variation, and competitive pressure than the earlier narrative implied. Global overcapacity and aggressive Asian players changed the price and margin logic. The original assumption – “if we build enough GWh fast enough, the demand will take care of the rest” – no longer held.

Third, execution. Battery manufacturing turned out to be exactly what veterans had always said it was: hard, slow to master, unforgiving of optimism. Yields lagged, quality issues surfaced, ramps took longer, and the industrial playbook was never fully codified before it was replicated across sites. Learning velocity never caught up with execution velocity.

Fourth, policy and politics. Support stayed real, but it stopped being singular. National priorities diverged, subsidy regimes evolved, and the neat story of a single European backbone turned into a more fragmented landscape of local agendas and trade-offs.

This is exactly where an ecosystem needs its “hard future” design to kick in:

• Thresholds that say, “if yields are still here by this date, we pause expansion and fix the plant before we build the next one.”
• Triggers that say, “if demand drops below this band, we slow capacity and protect the balance sheet.”
• Options that say, “if auto remains harder than expected, we have a path to double down on storage, industrial, or other segments.”

In Northvolt’s case, those elements existed more as hopes than as architecture. When optionality and volatility became real, the system had very little room left to bend. So it broke. The uncomfortable truth is that by the time most leaders admit the future has moved, they have already spent most of their room to manoeuvre.

Five operating gaps that mattered more than the headline metrics

The Northvolt story is not just about scale. It is about missing or underdeveloped parts of an ecosystem operating system that matter most under stress. Through the IIBE lens, these are precisely the parts of the operating system – sensing, learning, co‑creation, orchestration, renewal – that determine whether an ecosystem keeps its strategic freedom or slides into entrapment.

1. Sensing that doesn’t change decisions

Signals were not absent. Yield, quality, cancellations, cost gaps, capital markets – all of these were visible in one form or another.

The gap was between seeing and acting. There is a difference between “we know this is hard” and “we have agreed in advance what we will pause, re‑sequence, or redesign when this specific signal crosses a line.” The architecture did not tie key indicators to specific moves.

If nobody can say what will actually make you slow down or shrink, you are effectively promising to keep going until something breaks.

2. Learning that can’t keep up with building

Northvolt tried to scale an industrial capability faster than it could be mastered. New sites were started before the first one had a stable, proven playbook. Scarce expertise was spread across too many fronts at once.

The visible story celebrated “how much” was being built. The less visible story was “how well” it was working in practice, and whether those lessons were being codified fast enough to change the next investment decision.

In any ecosystem, the rule is harsh but simple: if you are building faster than you are learning, you are borrowing from your future options.

3. Co‑creation that drifts as realities diverge

At launch, the ecosystem had a powerful shared story: sovereign, circular, green batteries as a European project. Over time, each actor’s reality moved:

• Automakers faced margin pressure and shifting consumer demand.
• Governments faced electoral timelines, budget constraints, and new crises.
• Investors re‑rated risk as the macro environment shifted.

Without structured forums and mechanisms to revisit the ecosystem design, early alignment can become a museum piece. The story everyone signed up to remains on the wall, while behaviour quietly adapts to individual constraints.

If partners only truly co‑create at launch, they will redesign the system later – just not in the room with you.

4. Orchestration that centralises risk

Northvolt functioned as the central orchestrator for multiple interdependent coalitions: off-take, storage, recycling, local development. That worked as long as the centre held.

The more everything is routed through one hub, the more the entire structure inherits that hub’s fragility. When trouble hit, the shock travelled quickly across partners, regions and policy narratives.

An alternative is more modular orchestration:

• Sub‑ecosystems with their own governance and resilience.
• Clear interfaces between modules.
• The ability for certain parts of the system to slow or reconfigure without pulling the whole structure down.

An ecosystem that only works when you are at full strength is not resilient; it is dependent.

5. Renewal that was never fully designed

The public Northvolt story was dominated by one direction: more. More GWh, more plants, more jobs, more strategic weight.

What was largely absent was a designed path for less:

• What does a smaller but sustainable footprint look like?
• Which modules would you protect at all costs, and which could you release or transfer if needed?
• How do you shrink or pivot in a way that preserves core capabilities and relationships, rather than destroying them?

Growth pathways were explicit. Shrinkage and pivot pathways existed mainly as things you hoped never to discuss. When the moment came, there was no graceful way to step down the system.

If “down” is never drawn into the plan, the only time you will discuss it is when you no longer control the timing.

These gaps don’t show up in partner maps or order books, but they decide whether an ecosystem can bend or only break.

What this asks of today’s ecosystem leaders

Northvolt is now a matter of court filings and restructuring. The more important question is what others do with the pattern.

If you are a mature ecosystem orchestrator, the temptation is to look at Northvolt and say, “we’re different – we’re better run, better capitalised, more experienced.” That may all be true. The deeper question is whether your own architecture has baked in genuine room to move when optionality and volatility become more than a risk slide. If you recognise long-term commitments you cannot easily slow or renegotiate, Northvolt is a warning that governance fatigue and option debt can quietly turn a strong ecosystem into a trap.

If you are a potential disruptor, the lesson is where to look for leverage: incumbents whose ecosystems look impressive today but have quietly spent most of their future freedom on one path. There is opportunity in the gaps between what their story promises and what their architecture can actually flex to. For challengers, the most powerful moves are often built around exactly those gaps – offering partners and customers a more flexible ecosystem design where incumbents are rigid.

If you are an established incumbent without an explicit ecosystem strategy, the risk is inverse. You may feel safer precisely because you are not making big, visible bets. But ecosystems now fail and succeed in ways that reshape entire sectors. Sitting outside the game is no longer neutral. It is its own exposure. The danger is being locked into someone else’s brittle ecosystem and only discovering their constraints when a Northvolt‑style failure ripples through your suppliers, regulators, or customers.

Leaders are usually closer to a Northvolt‑type pattern when they recognise combinations like:

• Expansion decisions that feel “locked in” even though key assumptions have clearly shifted.
• Operational or quality issues that keep reappearing across sites, partners or regions.
• Board and executive discussions dominated by capital, scale and narrative, with very little attention paid to exit routes, pause conditions, or renewal options.

Three questions, then:

• How fit does your ecosystem look on paper – and how much real room to move is left once you add optionality and volatility to the picture?
• Where have you allowed momentum – capital, politics, narrative – to outrun your ability to slow down, redesign, or shrink without breaking the system?
• Are you designing an ecosystem that can only win if the first future you imagined turns out to be right, or one that can bend when the world refuses to follow your slide deck?

The point is not to build smaller dreams. It is to build architectures that can survive the collision between big ambitions and a world that rarely behaves on cue.

If parts of this pattern feel uncomfortably familiar, don’t wait for your own Northvolt moment.

We run a small number of half‑day IIBE ecosystem fitness reviews with leadership teams: together we score the health of your ecosystem, surface brittle dependencies, and outline 2–3 concrete moves you can take in the next 90 days.

If you’d like to explore whether this would help in your situation, contact us with “Northvolt” in the subject line and a line about your role, and we’ll share how we typically run these sessions and what others have learned from them.

The post Northvolt: When ecosystem ambition outruns your room to move first appeared on Your Ecosystem Design Hub.

I believe there is a strong positioning proposal for forming an Intelligent Integrated Energy Ecosystem to confront the growing Grid Crisis.

Let’s Frame the Challenge– Across Europe, as well as the United States of America and multiple countries or regions globally, electricity grids are reaching structural limits

Increasing renewable penetration, growing electrification, distributed energy resources (DER), and the rise of prosumers have created a coordination problem of enormous complexity.

Taking a different approach to this forming a Grid Alliance

Today’s grid challenges are not the result of technology gaps—they result from ecosystem gaps:

• Fragmented renewable integration approaches
• Distributed assets without unified aggregation or operational schemas
• Intermittency unmanaged across boundaries
• Grid operators unable to access DER flexibility at scale
• Investors, OEMs, aggregators, policy makers and system operators working in parallel—not together

This is the classic coordination failure that the Intelligent Integrated Business Ecosystem (IIBE) I have been building was made to find a resolution.

The grid is no longer just a “utility problem.” It is a multi-party ecosystem design problem requiring shared infrastructure, neutral governance, and coordinated intelligence.

A Radically New and Different Proposal:

**The Grid Alliance — An IIBE-Designed Energy Ecosystem**

One potential part of a cluster of Energy Flexibility & Resilience Ecosystem Alliance.

Inspired by exemplars such as the AMPShare Battery Alliance, the proposal is to create a neutral, orchestrated, multi-party Grid Alliance where competitors and stakeholders collaborate on shared infrastructure, shared intelligence, and interoperable standards—while continuing to innovate, compete, and differentiate on applications, markets, and services.

This Alliance would become the coordination fabric enabling Europe’s energy transition to operate at speed and scale.

Why the AMPShare Alliance Offers Potentially Breakthrough Templates

The AMPShare Battery Alliance demonstrates a strategic principle central to IIBE thinking: it rose above competition by collaborating on the foundational layer to unlock greater markets, greater speed, and shared system-level benefits.

Studying this through an Ecosystem Lens any Energy Ecosystem alliance can gai key transferable design lessons that “dampen” competition and elevate co-creation:

1. Shift from Product Logic to Platform Logic

As AMPShare made the battery the platform, the Grid Alliance makes grid flexibility, DER orchestration, and shared intelligence the platform.

2. Standardisation Creates Network Effects

Shared grid data models, interoperability standards, and aggregation protocols would unlock exponential value. More participants → more benefit → more adoption → greater resilience.

3. Coopetition at Its Best

Participants collaborate on the grid-level infrastructure while competing on energy services, optimisation algorithms, customer propositions, and market participation models.

4. Lowering Transaction Costs Across the Entire System

Just as AMPShare removed friction for consumers, a Grid Alliance can without doubt remove friction for:

• DER participation
• Interoperability
• Cross-market flexibility trading
• Grid services procurement
• Investment flows

5. Governance Enables Scale

A neutral platform, transparent rules, staged innovation cycles, and open membership would create credibility and attract new entrants—including start-ups, innovators, and regions lacking legacy infrastructure advantages.

6. Multi-Sided Value Creation

The Alliance increases value across all stakeholder groups: so fully engagement them

• Grid operators: visibility, flexibility, stability
• DER owners: revenue, access to markets
• OEMs: expanded demand for devices, inverters, storage
• Retailers/aggregators: new service models
• Regulators: faster compliance and implementation
• Communities & consumers: resilience, lower cost, energy security
• Investors: predictable scale and reduced risk

The Ecosystem Opportunity- Addressing the Crisis head on

Current Drivers Are Creating “Fertile” Ground to Explore

1. Renewable Penetration is Reaching Critical Stability Limits– The system is buckling under variability, inertia loss, and complexity.

2. Battery Costs Have Collapsed -Mass storage and local batteries can be orchestrated into a virtual grid asset—if standards exist.

3. Regulatory Windows Are Opening (e.g., FERC Order 2222 equivalents in Europe) – Policymakers increasingly mandate DER participation and interoperability.

4. Timelines for Grid Reinforcement Are Too Long Twenty-year infrastructure cycles cannot support five-year energy transitions.

5. Value Is Shifting From Assets to Coordination – The future energy system is less about building more assets and more about orchestrating what already exists.

This is exactly the IIBE lens: intelligence + integration + interconnection as the way to “question and form”

The Proposal Suggested:

A Grid Alliance Based on the IIBE Framework

The Alliance would use the IIBE (Integrated Interconnected Business Ecosystem) as its structural architecture:

1. The Outer Purpose & Shared North Star

“To build a resilient, interoperable, intelligently coordinated energy system that supports the renewable transition, reduces risk, and accelerates grid stability through shared ecosystem collaboration.”

2. The Three Zones of the Intelligent Ecosystem to explore as “trigger points”

Zone 1 — Shared Intelligence & Visibility (The Adaptive Engine)

• Common data models and exchange frameworks
• Real-time system visualisation across DER, storage, grid flows
• Shared analytics for forecasting, optimisation, and incident prevention
• AI-based grid orchestration complements human oversight

Zone 2 — Shared Infrastructure Layer (The IIBE DOS)

• Interoperability frameworks for DER and battery systems
• Standardised aggregation protocols
• Coordinated flexibility markets
• Technical standards for VPP integration
• Security, safety and certification frameworks

This is the “battery platform” equivalent: the layer everyone must unite around.

Zone 3 — Differentiated Value Creation

Each party competes and innovates on:

• Consumer energy services
• DER optimisation tools
• AI optimisation models
• Demand response offerings
• Community energy platforms
• Market-facing products

Competition remains vigorous—but anchored to a shared foundation.

Why a Grid Alliance Is Necessary Now

1. The Problem Is Systemic, Not Individual

No single company, utility, regulator, or technology stack can stabilise the grid alone.

2. Ecosystem Dynamics Create a Multiplying Effect

Coordinated action increases adoption and performance far faster than isolated efforts.

3. Alliances Outperform Bilateral Models in Complex Transitions

The EV charging industry, smart home platforms, and battery alliances show that ecosystem-level coordination beats proprietary silos.

4. Without Cooperation, Everyone Loses

The cost of grid failure—blackouts, curtailed renewables, stranded assets, political backlash—far exceeds the cost of collaboration.

Finding the Strategic Benefits for all within the Energy Alliance

For Grid Operators

• Increased predictability
• New flexibility resources
• Avoided grid reinforcement costs

For Consumers & Communities

• Fair access to participation
• Lower cost energy
• More reliable systems

For OEMs & Tech Providers

• Expanded market adoption
• Faster ROI
• Lower integration complexity

For Regulators

• Practical implementation of policy goals
• A coordinated partner for system-wide planning

For Investors

• Lower risk through standardisation
• Predictable scaling pathways
• Higher confidence in returns

**The Call to Action:

Rise Above the Competition for Shared System Success

The grid crisis is the classic ecosystem moment: the system is failing not from lack of technology but from lack of coordination, integration, and shared intelligence.

The lesson from AMPShare is clear: Interoperability and shared standards unlock a market far larger than any single player can create alone.

A Grid Alliance—designed with the IIBE as its guiding architecture—offers a credible, neutral, strategic platform for bringing together:

• Utilities
• OEMs
• DER aggregators
• Storage providers
• Policymakers
• Grid operators
• Investors
• Research and innovation bodies
• Communities and prosumer groups
• Regulators

The aim is to solve together what no one can solve alone.

This is the moment where ecosystems become the operating model of the energy transition. It is the time to think and design in Ecosystems to build out those more connected and integrated solutions needed for the Grid Crisis we are facing today.

Contact me to explore this further

The post  The Urgent Need for Flexibility & Resilience through Energy Ecosystem Alliances. first appeared on Your Ecosystem Design Hub.

There have been so many success stories, specifically in industry and the energy transition, that are so reliant on collaborations and co-creations, coming from essential ecosystem design and thinking. This is partly why I focus on the Energy Transition and Industrial Transformation for my innovation and ecosystem work.

Let us remind ourselves where those collaborations between different stakeholders deliver real change in radical, innovative solutions.

They will only build out further in 2024:

1. Renewable Energy Collaborations: In the energy sector, various collaborations between renewable energy companies, technology providers, and government bodies have led to developing innovative solutions. For instance, offshore wind energy projects often involve partnerships between energy companies, engineering firms, and local authorities to generate efficient and sustainable energy.
2. Smart Grid and Energy Management: Utility companies are partnering with technology firms to build smart grids and implement energy management solutions. These ecosystems enable better control and optimization of energy distribution, reducing energy wastage and increasing efficiency.
3. Electric Vehicle Ecosystems: The automotive industry is shifting toward electric vehicles (EVs). Ecosystems are forming around EV charging infrastructure, battery technology, and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) integration. Companies like Tesla and EV charging networks are examples of players contributing to this transition.
4. Energy Storage Innovations: Ecosystems involving energy storage providers, renewable energy companies, and grid operators are driving advancements in battery technology and energy storage solutions. These innovations support the integration of intermittent renewable energy sources into the grid.
5. Industrial Energy Efficiency: Industries are collaborating with energy service providers to improve energy efficiency. These ecosystems lead to implementing technologies like energy monitoring systems, predictive maintenance, and process optimization, reducing energy consumption and costs that require broad collaborations to deliver final solutions.
6. Circular Economy Initiatives: The concept of a circular economy involves minimizing waste and maximizing resource efficiency. Ecosystems are forming around recycling, remanufacturing, and waste-to-energy solutions, contributing to sustainable practices within industries requiring collaborative approaches.
7. Hydrogen Ecosystems: The development of hydrogen as a clean energy carrier involves collaborations among energy companies, industrial manufacturers, and research institutions. These ecosystems focus on various sectors’ hydrogen production, storage, distribution, and utilization.
8. Building Energy Management: Ecosystems in the construction and real estate sectors are centred around intelligent building technologies. Integrating energy-efficient systems, IoT devices, and data analytics optimizes energy use and enhances occupant comfort.
9. Decentralized Energy Solutions: Microgrids and decentralized energy systems are emerging ecosystems that allow communities, campuses, and industries to generate, store, and manage their own energy. These solutions increase resilience and reduce dependency on centralized grids.
10. Collaborative Research and Innovation: Universities, research institutions, and industry partners are forming ecosystems to drive research and innovation in energy transition technologies. This collaboration accelerates the development and adoption of breakthrough solutions.

These success stories demonstrate how ecosystem thinking is pivotal in driving the energy transition and creating positive impacts across industries. Collaborations between stakeholders with diverse expertise are crucial for addressing complex energy challenges and achieving sustainable outcomes.

I do not doubt that ecosystem thinking and design will form an even more prominent part of the energy transition in 2024. Collaborations will be at the forefront of thinking to tackle complex challenges and provide solutions that can rapidly scale on platform solutions.

Welcome to 2024 for building even more energy and industrial transition momentum.

The post Seeking more Energy Transition Ecosystem Success Stories in 2024 first appeared on Your Ecosystem Design Hub.

A range of success stories showcase the value of ecosystem thinking in different industries relating to the energy transition. These are important to emphasise as they recognize the importance of combining a mix of stakeholders, technologies and organizations in interconnected and interdependent ways.

Ask how we can leverage and use Ecosystem thinking and design to promote innovation within the Energy Transition, as it is a powerful approach to radical change. By fostering collaborations and synergies, you can accelerate the development and adoption of innovative solutions for the energy transition.

Before we look at examples of ecosystem thinking and designs applied, we should consider a step-by-step guide to use and apply ecosystem thinking and design applicable to the energy transition.

How to use ecosystem thinking and design for this purpose:

Gain an understanding of the Ecosystem: Begin by mapping out the energy transition ecosystem (subsystem). Identify key stakeholders, such as governments, research institutions, energy companies, technology startups, investors, regulatory bodies, and consumers. Understand their roles, motivations, challenges, and interests in the energy transition.

Start to sketch out and Identify the Innovation Opportunities: Look for gaps, challenges, and opportunities within the ecosystem. Consider areas where innovation is needed to overcome barriers to the energy transition, such as renewable energy integration, energy storage, grid modernization, electrification of transportation, and more.

Begin to figure out how to build Collaboration Networks: Facilitate collaboration among diverse stakeholders. Explore platforms, conferences, workshops, and forums where stakeholders can come together to share knowledge, exchange ideas, and collaborate on innovative solutions. Discuss cross-sector partnerships and open innovation models to stimulate engagement and identification.

Look to the support of Startups and Entrepreneurs: Find avenues with a supportive environment for startups and entrepreneurs working on energy transition technologies. Always look at any access to funding, mentorship, and resources. Incubators, accelerators, and innovation hubs can be crucial in nurturing new ideas, but the ecosystem’s health is in the funding, involvement and support.

Draw up a kick-starter approach to gaining attention and having an Ecosystem thinking checklist.

Promote Information Sharing: Develop mechanisms for sharing information, research, and data to stimulate exchanging and thinking. Open data initiatives can help researchers, innovators, and policymakers access valuable information to drive innovation and achieve a quicker formation of an ecosystem network to work on an idea or concept.

Highlight potential Regulatory Challenges: Find independent bodies willing to invest time and expertise with regulatory bodies to set about and create a conducive environment for innovation. Seek out regulations that map out a pathway to accommodate new technologies and business models while ensuring safety, security, and sustainability while making any transition.

Seek out that ‘combination effect’ that encourages Technological Diversity: Embrace various technological solutions to explore and seek willing bodies or entities to test them. Energy transitions require a mix of renewable sources, energy storage systems, smart grids, and demand response mechanisms. Avoid overly focusing on a single technology and instead promote a diverse portfolio.

Innovation needs to focus on User-Centric Design consistently: Prioritize user needs and preferences when designing innovative solutions. Whether it’s consumers, businesses, or communities, understanding their requirements can lead to more effective and adopted technologies.

Work through a fast, hopefully agile approach to solution-finding

Experiment and Iterate: Embrace a culture of experimentation and iteration. Test new ideas in controlled environments, gather feedback, and refine solutions based on real-world experiences.

Measure and Evaluate: Establish metrics to measure the impact of innovation within the ecosystem. Monitor key performance indicators related to energy generation, emissions reduction, economic growth, job creation, and other relevant factors.

Use the outcomes to advocate early for Policy Changes: Collaborate with policymakers to advocate for policies that support innovation and the energy transition. Policy changes can incentivise investment, research, and development in clean energy technologies.

Bring others in to educate and raise awareness: Educate the public and stakeholders about the benefits and importance of the energy transition concept you can see has potential value. A well-informed society is more likely to support and demand innovative solutions. By applying ecosystem thinking and platform designs, you can offer a collaborative environment to accelerate ideas into concepts into commercial success.

Promoting innovation within the energy transition requires a long-term commitment and a holistic perspective. By fostering collaboration, embracing diversity, and focusing on user needs, you can create an ecosystem that accelerates the adoption of innovative technologies and paves the way for a sustainable energy future.

It is by working through this step-by-step thinking you see emerging possibilities.

Indeed, some success stories showcase the value of ecosystem thinking in various industries, particularly in the energy transition context.

There is the opportunity to accelerate these areas by applying ecosystem thinking and design and leverage new opportunities as the foundation pathways have been established to work through the steps outlined above fairly methodically quickly:

We have real examples of ecosystems across many of the parts of the Energy Transition

1. Renewable Energy Collaborations: In the energy sector, various collaborations between renewable energy companies, technology providers, and government bodies have led to the developing of innovative solutions. For instance, offshore wind energy projects often involve partnerships between energy companies, engineering firms, and local authorities to generate efficient and sustainable energy.
2. Smart Grid and Energy Management: Utility companies are partnering with technology firms to build smart grids and implement energy management solutions. These ecosystems enable better control and optimization of energy distribution, reducing energy wastage and increasing efficiency.
3. Electric Vehicle Ecosystems: The automotive industry is shifting toward electric vehicles (EVs). Ecosystems are forming around EV charging infrastructure, battery technology, and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) integration. Companies like Tesla and EV charging networks are examples of players contributing to this transition.
4. Energy Storage Innovations: Ecosystems involving energy storage providers, renewable energy companies, and grid operators are driving advancements in battery technology and energy storage solutions. These innovations support the integration of intermittent renewable energy sources into the grid.
5. Industrial Energy Efficiency: Industries are collaborating with energy service providers to improve energy efficiency. These ecosystems lead to implementing technologies like energy monitoring systems, predictive maintenance, and process optimization, reducing energy consumption and costs.
6. Circular Economy Initiatives: A circular economy minimises waste and maximises resource efficiency. Ecosystems are forming around recycling, remanufacturing, and waste-to-energy solutions, contributing to sustainable practices within industries.
7. Hydrogen Ecosystems: The development of hydrogen as a clean energy carrier involves collaborations among energy companies, industrial manufacturers, and research institutions. These ecosystems focus on various sectors’ hydrogen production, storage, distribution, and utilization.
8. Building Energy Management: Ecosystems in the construction and real estate sectors are centred around smart, intelligent building technologies. Integrating energy-efficient systems, IoT devices, and data analytics optimizes energy use and enhances occupant comfort.
9. Decentralized Energy Solutions: Microgrids and decentralized energy systems are emerging ecosystems that allow communities, campuses, and industries to generate, store, and manage their own energy. These solutions increase resilience and reduce dependency on centralized grids.
10. Collaborative Research and Innovation: Universities, research institutions, and industry partners are forming ecosystems to drive research and innovation in energy transition technologies. This collaboration accelerates the development and adoption of breakthrough solutions.

These success stories demonstrate ecosystem thinking is pivotal in driving the energy transition and creating positive impacts across industries. Collaborations between stakeholders with diverse expertise are crucial for addressing complex energy challenges and achieving sustainable outcomes.

Our job is to leverage the concept of Ecosystem thinking and design to unleash its potential and accelerate innovative, sustainable and progressive solutions in changing our Energy approaches.

The post Where are the success stories of Ecosystem thinking in the Energy Transition? first appeared on Your Ecosystem Design Hub.

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.”

Siemens generated Euro 62.3 billion in revenue in fiscal 2021, employing around 303,000 employees worldwide that provides solutions to more resource-efficient factories, resilient supply chains, and smarter buildings and grids, to cleaner and more comfortable transportation as well as advanced healthcare. Siemens states very clearly it creates technology with purpose, adding real value for customers.

What Siemens Xcelerator comprises and will move towards achieving

Xcelerator is a curated portfolio, a growing ecosystem and an evolving marketplace that will build out over the coming months and years. The complexity of this transformation is huge. and will be taken step by step.

It is a very big deal with the commitment of “Siemens will transform its entire portfolio of hardware and software to become modular, cloud-connected and built on standard application programming interfaces (APIs). The highest standards and value for all parties will be ensured by strong technical and commercial governance principles. Siemens and third-party offerings will adhere to the design principles of interoperability, flexibility, openness and as-a-service”

In my view, to take their “entire leading portfolio and transform it 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.” is a massive undertaking when you adhere to these design principles of offering interoperability, flexibility, openness and as-a-service.

The launch event was chock full of examples, of industrial leaders from Science & Technology, Space Exploration, Transport, Vehicles, and Grid providers all giving their view of a future, a future of collaborations

Please visit the launch site here where it provides much of the different launch material from today’s event.

The need to replicate and learn

A real message was the ambition through Xcelerator is to replicate and learn, to gain from one set of experiences and challenges, in one industry, or a building or grid solution and scale that out, not so much a plug and play but a plug & run. The ability to optimise the end-to-end system value.

During the launch event, three parts of the transformation being undertaken were additionally announced.

• Launch of new Building X end-to-end smart building Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) suite
  • Planned acquisition of Brightly Software will accelerate growth in digital buildings complementing Siemens’ smart building portfolio
  • Partner ecosystem grows through industrial metaverse partnership with NVIDIA for physics-based, immersive digital twin development

New SaaS launch with Building X kicking this off

Siemens Smart Infrastructure has launched Building X, a new smart building suite that is open, interoperable and fully cloud-based. The suite is the first next-generation offering built on the design principles of Siemens Xcelerator, an open digital business platform launched today to accelerate digital transformation and value creation across industry, transportation, grids and buildings. The “X” stands for delivering these design principles of offering interoperability, flexibility, openness and as-a-service.

Explaining Building X

Building X addresses the challenges of various stakeholders, including building users, investors, real estate companies and facility managers. It acts as a single source of truth to eliminate complexity and supports net-zero targets. Stakeholders can now digitize and use their building data from various sources, disciplines and systems on one single platform, Building X.

This enables a seamless user experience and the integration of their existing software and ecosystem, including third-party applications, through vendor-agnostic connectivity and open application programming interfaces (APIs). The suite offers modular, AI-enabled applications, and built-in cyber security. It also facilitates co-creation with customers and partners to address their challenges faster, thanks to the openness and cloud technology, which means digital transformation can be achieved easier, faster and at scale.

* I will pick up on this in a separate post as it brings to life the modular, scalable, open building suite that is designed to seamlessly integrate building systems to eliminate current complexity and enables the combination of sustainability goals and accelerating solutions to reach net-zero buildings.

Secondly, to build out Building X on Monday, June 27, 2022, Siemens announced the agreement to purchase Brightly Software, a leading U.S.-based asset and maintenance management software company. The acquisition will add Brightly‘s well-established capabilities across key sectors to Siemens’ digital and software know-how in buildings. It will be an additional core element of the Siemens Xcelerator for Buildings portfolio.

Thirdly a partnership announcement that continues to build out the Ecosystem network of Siemens with the announcement that with NVIDIA the plan is for a new era of immersive digital twin technology

Siemens will be making a considerable expansion to its Ecosystem of partners. It is committing significantly to joining forces and growing a strong partner ecosystem, building on existing strategic partnerships including Accenture, Atos, AWS, Bentley, Microsoft and SAP. The intention is to expand the partner ecosystem with multiple small, medium and large companies to solve problems by finding the right partnership solutions.

NVIDIA is the first major partnership agreement under the Siemens Xcelerator umbrella. The two companies today announced an expansion of their partnership to enable the industrial metaverse and increase the use of AI-driven digital twin technology that will help bring industrial automation to a new level. As the first step in this collaboration, the companies plan to connect Siemens Xcelerator, the open digital business platform and NVIDIA Omniverse, a platform for 3D design and collaboration. This will enable an industrial metaverse with physics-based digital models from Siemens and AI-enabled, physically accurate, real-time simulation from NVIDIA where companies make decisions faster and with increased confidence.

Here the ambition of building out the Industrial Metaverse begins to come to life. The power of having a digital twin to enable the real and virtual worlds to come together, to be simulated, to be tested, and designed before the actual real world. The exciting partnership offers a significant change to how the digital transformation will travel.

Picking up in the press release and within the event solutions for IIoT are building at a pace equally

A further part of the event mentions that Siemens also plans to integrate its industrial internet of things (IIoT) solutions for industry as Industrial Operations X, which brings together solutions and applications from the sensor to edge to cloud, IoT as-a-service and low code development capabilities, as well as a wide range of ready-to-use-apps. This will enable the fusion of data from the real world of automation with the digital world of information technology, enriched by Siemens’ comprehensive vertical IT/ OT integration knowledge and capabilities.

The key here, like all that Xcelerator is planning to do, finding solutions with partners that set about breaking down data silos and customer challenges to help companies to increase their performance, productivity, flexibility and sustainability. That alone is not a small deal it is the ability to enable faster innovation and value creation, to transform and why Xcelerator becomes the connector and power to enable the realization of Siemens being a focused technology company together in a thriving ecosystem of technology partners.

The beginning of a very different Siemens dawned today

The outcome for me is that today’s event begins the transformation of a very different business model for Siemens, one that moves from selling products to selling solutions and outcomes that the customer wants. If they want a box, product, or machine, then fine but if they want a complete solution then Siemens and its partners can find and offer the solution.

I want to absorb the multiple points of what was present here, it was arguable massive in ambition but so is the digital transition. Siemens has put a clear stake in the ground in transforming themselves and providing this Xcelerator platform that brings their portfolio (and others) around a growing Ecosystem and providing a growing marketplace of solutions, not products, to the challenges of making a step change within the industrial digital transformation

Please visit the Siemens site for all the different press releases relating to today’s event and this link to the specific launch page.

Disclaimer: This article is published in partnership with Siemens. Siemens is paying for my engagement, not for promotional purposes. Opinions are my own

The post Siemens launches Xcelerator for navigating the digital transformation first appeared on Your Ecosystem Design Hub.

Connected Network or Ecosystem Forming

The growing need to have a deeper understanding of the connections within Ecosystems has taken me into the world of Artificial Intelligence (AI) with the ability to quickly search for connected areas that “make” ecosystems.

So what is the value of AI when you are researching a subject? I have found applying a selected “natural language generation” technique as helpful.  It has accelerated and streamlined my research, making any analysis faster, it has been sometimes fairly puzzling in some of the outputs but I feel you are gaining from “real-time” data and keyword associations that provide new insights. The end results will certainly help shape my thinking into the future of Ecosystem Management.

For the past six or so weeks I have been looking into Ecosystems and one of my strands of research took me to “Natural Language Understanding” and I read an article by Mark Seall, Head of Digital Communications at Siemens called “How AI is shaping the future of marketing communications” and it got me curious. I got in contact with him and he encourage me to dig a little deeper by using the Siemens AI tool as I have a collaboration agreement in place with them.

Ecosystems are made up of many connected areas

Applying AI to my Ecosystem work has given me a new way to relate”what makes up ecosystems” and especially learning different ways of looking specifically at the links between innovation and ecosystems.

I have been applying AI through access to this interrogation tool on the following aspects of “Ecosystems”. I generated different results for:

• Ecosystems
• Innovation Ecosystems
• Business Ecosystems
• Ecosystem Management

I then have extended this out to cover off searches into

• Knowledge Management with a specific ecosystem enquiry,
• Digital Platforms and
• Sustaining Innovation.

I wrote about the initial AI work on my posting site paul4innovating.com with a recent article ” Innovation Ecosystem Understanding through an AI-driven approach”

Let me repeat some of this article to build more context.

Initial output for “Ecosystems” in general

I narrowed down the general use of “Ecosystems” in my searches to more Ecosystem-related or orientated to Business are still providing interesting triggers like “Novel Ecosystems”, “Ecosystem Models”, “Ecosystem Service”, “Ecosystem Thinking” and “Ecosystem Design”

In my early rounds, I decided in taking out “Sustainability”, “Circular Economy”, “Life-Cycle Assessment,” to gain a better amplification of the points above. These different searches have given some good food for thought on future approaches to “Ecosystems” Both outputs or rounds offer different approaches to Ecosystems.

Then investigating the Outputs for “Innovation Ecosystems”

As for “Innovation Ecosystems” that yielded a veritable host of strands of associated thinking. These included “Value Networks”, “Transferring Knowledge”, “Diffusions of Innovation”, “Network Design and Theory”, “Co-creation, “Platform Design”, “Competitive Positioning,” “Dynamics of Innovation” and “Innovation Impact” among some others that have taken my thinking in new directions.

For this post, I have added an output visual from the tool to show these.

The size of the bubbles is the “relative”  number of related counts (websites, posts etc) giving the greater association with ” Innovation Ecosystems”

Innovation Ecosystems output (v4)

Innovation Ecosystems v4

Then I found comparing “Innovation Ecosystems” with “Business Ecosystems” really separated them in some unique ways.

What I did find was that much as “Innovation Ecosystems” was certainly a rich data set, the “Business Ecosystems” one was much richer. This is where I pick up from by focusing on Business Ecosystems

Business Ecosystems output (v4)

Business Ecosystems v4

Again, the size of the bubbles is the “relative”  number of related counts (websites, posts etc) giving the greater association with “Business Innovation” This is a little misleading on actual content size but to get the total bubble content on one page you need to click on the name, within the tool, to see the actual count.

The different colours refer to breaking out different subjects into focus relevancy, including trending areas, niche, mainstream etc., etc.

So what do these AI-generated outputs tell me?

Clearly, areas that have importance to understand when discussing or researching ecosystems. This could be an end result or platform understanding that will enable ecosystems, or to areas that need to be applied to ecosystem thinking or design.

Another very useful design of this specific tool is offering search recommendations on what you should do more or less of.

I have gone on with additional versions, learning to screen out certain keywords that are mainstream, such as Digital Transformation is an (accepted) result of applying Business Ecosystems.

Mapping back to Ecosystem Management

At the moment I am mapping back to exploring “Ecosystem Management” and looking at the “returns on content” in different visual ways of relative importance to Ecosystem Management, for example:

Ecosystem Management v1

You have to be careful, like on any tool, you can keep playing but arguable your knowledge and the AI thinking behind the tool improves but you do have to stop and think about how you relate AI outputs into what you as a “human” are wanting to learn and apply. More to what and where you want to invest your knowledge and experience, in this case on Ecosystems to guide and advice on where to focus.

So I now need time to absorb and reflect on what I am learning here

The end results will certainly help shape my thinking into the future of Ecosystem Management.

As I have already mentioned in my previous post I have found growing insights and triggers. Applying this learning and converting this into “future understanding” is my next step.

**Siemens has a collaboration with Storyroom.ai. Storyroom provides a set of unique datasets and AI to meaningfully connect concepts, ideas or thoughts, to drive awareness and engagement.  Storyroom is a venture-backed AI startup, based in California.

The post Business Innovation Ecosystems first appeared on Your Ecosystem Design Hub.

A Statement of Ecosystem Intent – the CEO letter that is often missing but highly essential to have as part of any ecosystem design thinking.

Ecosystems have become a really hot topic. The word “Ecosystem” is getting as much “air time” as the general use of the word “innovation” in business recently.

It generates buzz, it projects the impression you are looking to the future, managing your business in that progressive, outward way, that shareholders and your employees love to hear.

The shift taking place- Ecosystems are entering the lexicon of top management.

It does sound good to talk about “building our ecosystem” in every possible way. You need to ask though, has management actually sat down and defined the type of ecosystem it wants to design, participate in, or become part of? Or does this simply happen, a sort of drifting into, a grand experiment, not connecting all that is truly necessary for such a seismic move, stifling the real progressive sense?

Let’s take a different approach

What if the CEO and the board decided to open up the discussion around the future pathway, one of managing within a federation of ecosystem partners and collaborators.

Building the internal rationale- the open letter to all our employees and stakeholders.

What if you provided a document to all your employees that states a clear belief and direction you feel “our” business is heading towards, would that not make sense?

I really think we have not yet (in many cases) built a connected, compelling rationale for managing Ecosystems.

From the CEO and the Board to all within our company and all our stakeholders

We are evaluating and changing our existing focus from closed (internal orientation) into ones that are having a far more open stance. We are searching for more collaborative innovation (external orientation) combining external partners into more ‘collective thinking’. We are exploring the concept of Ecosystems and where it contributes new value.

This shift to an Ecosystem Design we believe is offering us extra acceleration that is needed to improve our innovation performances from concept to market delivery. It can help us to grow our business in new, radically different ways. We see potential in moving from our existing core through growing our alliances and networks to produce greater product solutions, ones that connect far more with the customer’s needs through the greater use of technology and the power of connection.

Collaborative innovation is also leading us to higher chances of achieving greater impact and success, as nearly all novel ideas lay outside the organization’s domain of understanding. As we increasingly include the customer and their needs within our understanding, these multiple collaborations and dialogues are building this better internal understanding.

By recognizing we are not sole owners of knowledge but are in a world of distributed knowledge, we seek to encourage new dialogues, new avenues and new sources of collaboration. This is not just to leverage the internal expertise we have, but to compliment it and challenge it, in new innovative ways, to lead to a new range of market and product opportunities that are radically different and exciting to deliver.

We know we are constantly moving away from managing in linear innovation processes and making these more adaptive, constantly looping back when new information or data as it is being discovered, increasing this knowledge and insight in highly dynamic, constantly evolving and informing ways. We need to accelerate this in imaginative and novel ways.

We wish to form more valuable external relationships in multiple and different ways as this will simply increase our access to diversity. This greater diversity does matter to each organization for building different competitive positions in our future approaches to go about business in wider areas of scope.

We are creating the potential to deliver innovative products and services through new business models that would not have been enabled by only having one organization attempting it. Collaborations are significantly adding value into the innovation equation, offering greater options to explore in the future.

Also, we are seeing complexity rising significantly. The search for finding greater value is shifting even further, increasingly forming around innovation ecosystems, loose federations of vested interest, forming and dispersing when the job is complete. Sharing in risk and returns at a faster pace.

Our innovation exploration will become far more evolutionary and requires a completely different way to think and manage these ‘relationship contracts that are forming around a given concept of platform engagements.

We will need to learn how to be far more cooperative, open and agile, new adaptive thinking.  As we tap into all the expertise up and down and along the value chain, we will become far more aware and will need to explore all the depth in thinking, contributing and making available through extending our connections in deeper and broader ways.

Knowing how to adjust, accommodate and shift our thinking requires us to become more agile, a more “fluid organization, finding new ways of connecting and working.

The opening up to new, exciting possibilities. Our further thinking with this move

Today there is a growing realization that thinking ecosystems can allow us to have a new framing of possibilities, to offer us an exposure to alter our mindsets. One that taps into different and diverse relationships, partnerships, alliances, and collaborations. This was unthinkable until recently, without the enablers to make these connections through technology and more open platforms where you can come together and collaborate. We need to exploit this connecting world fully to extract the best solutions.

The increasing value of participating in ecosystems allows for large and small organizations to create, scale and serve markets, in ways unthought-of, previously. The ability to interact and co-create in increasingly sophisticated and novel ways opens up new opportunities. These ecosystems form a bond of shared interest, of recognition and purpose, which quickly becomes established as the new ‘commons’ in sharing and contributing internally.

We need to understand all of this, we are on a learning journey, one that does excite us but also challenges us. As we begin to open up our thinking around the concept of ecosystems, we believe it will increasingly have a powerful effect on our future growth perspectives. One where a network of different partners will all contribute to this often ‘emergent’ thinking to increase the total sum of the value. We look towards achieving a greater “value creation” from this.

For us to get to this new thinking around Ecosystems we need to re-think our future design for new partnerships across and external to the business

Let us ask some really open questions here, we are beginning to work upon different concepts and solutions, so you are aware and can help.  We would appreciate your involvement and engagement, it will potentially and fundamentally change how we will operate as a company.

We need to evolve and find the answers to this new ecosystem thinking and perhaps countless other design questions that emerge as we embark on a change of this nature as it becomes highly collaborative.

This will demand us to become “ecosystem ready.” So what does that mean?

We need to rethink our corporate and deal relating strategy. We need new ways to evaluate, model and place valuation on what we want to engage upon. This will require different due diligence.

We also need to think about what we can offer and what we believe is our future market offering and potential. This will change our present thinking around intellectual property, about data exchanges, security, and privacy

It will call upon all of us to think about how to change, to adjust, to highlight gaps we might have and the different types of talent we need to bring into the business.

We have worked hard to build up our understanding, to bring much of this together but we see this as an evolving journey, supported by a growing ecosystem of partners and collaborators and your open involvement.

What will change in our operations, in our planning, in our response rates?

How do we maintain our reputation but also go out and build this in new, more exciting ways that attract our shareholders and stakeholders to relate and invest in our business?

Risk management, controls, and governance all need a different more responsive and robust framework for us to form relationships, with less fear, greater guidelines. We need to encourage a greater culture to experiment, to explore, learn and engage

The whole approach to cybersecurity changes, as we collaborate, we will exchange at even faster rates, we must ensure our business security is not compromised or those of our partners. We need trust and belief that what we undertake is secure.

We need to seek out knowledge and bring this back inside the company so we can all internally grow with a collaborative network.

When you spend your energies on ‘control’ you want to manage this within your own environment. When we “step out” and work alongside others in a network of ecosystems we have to find ways to simply “let go” but still account and report in ways that do not place what we have at risk. Managing this is not going to be easy but ways that can be found, are our belief and commitment.

All of these require a shift in resources, capital allocation, planning, in cultural adaptive ways. We need to become more fluid, less rigid, we need to become more responsive, curious, and dynamic.

It does call for a very different way we will be going to manage the business in the future. We have some answers that encourage us to recommend and pursue this journey. This journey of being far more aware and participative in a different thriving ecosystem made up of multiple collaborators, One where connecting networks and thriving relationships can evolve. We should choose to walk this path together.

We have a distinct culture, we cannot impose ours on others, we can articulate our values, but we need to learn from others that want to engage within the ecosystem sharing. This can offer a distinct challenge, but it can allow us to extend out and appreciate far more. Mutual understanding strengthens bonds and builds a greater ecosystem, built on a greater relationship and network than standing alone. We validate and confirm, we adjust and can sharpen our beliefs. Sharing and exchanging knowledge is a powerful catalyst to informed change.

So as the CEO, with my fellow board members, we ask for your help.

As your CEO, along with my fellow board members, we will want to spend some time discussing this with you all. It is a transforming step, but it offers a new way of managing. It holds excitement, promise and we believe a more sustainable future to build out our business, in highly collaborative and valued ways

We will need to equally learn from you, wanting your contribution and questions. We are all learning as it opens up a completely different way to work and manage our business, in highly collaborative ways. In some cases, there are no easy answers, and we will not have immediate answers, but “we” will find them together.

Will you join me on this journey where managing and collaborating within ecosystems will be offering us something that can be summed up as radical and exciting?

One where we believe will provide us greater belief in building a sustainable future, where we adjust, respond, and change in a demanding, very challenging and rapidly changing world, that we are all part of. One where we see change as exciting, different and highly connected, to strengthen and build out a common purpose, of creating new value, growth and fresh opportunities for the future.

The post A Statement of Ecosystem Intent – the CEO letter often missing first appeared on Your Ecosystem Design Hub.

Making Sustainability central to innovation capability building in a new ecosystem designed way connects the parts into the future design.

Let me tell you my story and how it continues to evolve

Today’s challenge is to build the capacity to be different, to sustain the critical aspect that innovation can provide: the stimulus for sustaining lasting growth.

It is through continued open learning, capabilities become stronger and more difficult for competitors to understand and imitate. Capabilities grow through use and application in increasingly intensified ways. Knowledge explored, offers new knowledge gained.

Ecosystem thinking is becoming central to our future as we open up to greater co-creation and collaborations opportunities. I believe co-creation spreads risk, accelerates ideas into higher-value solutions, builds out on diversity within the connections and relationship network, increased awareness and focus, that have the “combination effect” of greater potential to give impact and value in returns, attuned far more to customer needs or market trends. Building the capacity to innovate in more open, ecosystem ways strengthens the business pathway to a sustainable future.

Today the aim is to build distinctive capabilities, which draw out the characteristics of the organization, attract collaborators that are like-minded and driven by finding greater value out of combining growing diverse expertise that cannot be replicated by others easily, motivated by spotting “first mover” advantage in the designs achieved.

Bringing together partners provide new competitive edges that the competition finds increasingly hard to replicate. It is through value creation that is increasingly built on a collaborative approach you achieve greater sustainability.

We all make transitions in our work

I am finding myself re-positioning to a “transition advocate” recognizing the combined effects of applying innovation, in ecosystems designs and thinking, looking to support clients for future sustainable solutions. 

Specifically, I am focusing on the industrial internet of things (IIoT) and energy systems that are radically changing our world.

Combining innovation, ecosystem and sustainability is a step change.

Here is how I see this emerging new way of going about business that I am figuring out how to undertake:

• Transformational insights need to be explored at the front end of our transitions, those edges that offer real potential and many unknowns that we are all undertaking, these observations are providing the “fuel” and will underpin my supportive advisory & mentoring services to a client.
• Seeking out these dynamic environments nurtures an understanding of what is evolving, and what impact and growth opportunities this has for a business to explore and exploit,
• In my view, it is by taking the innovator’s perspective into the assessment of the need of a client’s transition needs.

Positioning the way forward.

• My primary role is advising and coaching within these areas of applying innovation, ecosystem thinking to sustainable thinking. The principal focuses then is to support and build internal capacity, competencies, and capabilities to undertake any transformation journey.
• I break my business out into dedicated focal topics into “big transforming” points of impact, applying understanding and insights that are in my mind complementary, synergistic or clarifying new emerging intersections, for growth potential that has value-adding impact and business model change.
• The combination of innovation within ecosystem thinking and the design approach has arrived, capitalizing on the value points of digitalisation combined with technology and human ingenuity; both in the Industrial IoT world and finding a growing place and pace in the Energy Transition, each is having, in my view, a very different combination effect for value creation and business impact. These are my primary focus points.

My Innovation intent has been central to this period in consulting, mentoring, coaching and advising business entities, start-ups, not-for-profit and government agencies. This intent has progressively ‘funnelled down’ into recognizing the value of ecosystems and the future work-to-be-done as the business design for innovation in the future; to thrive and deliver more significant value creation, especially in the Energy Transition underway.

The repositioning of my understanding has been a journey of comprehension and recognition.

I run a specialized advisor and mentoring business called Agility Innovation; it has an intensity of focus on its clients’ needs and always looking to contribute to a client’s own specific journey but I have often struggled to let go of the past ways of undertaking a business, using tools that are evolving but not as fast as taking a vastly different approach, an adaptive, flexible approach.

It is only recently I was seeing this combining aspect of innovation, ecosystems in thinking and design for sustainability, to shift my focus. I suppose this does have that real advantage of being small, nimble and, yes, agile (in my own way) to provide a new dimension and connected model.

The end result is bringing together many strands of thinking, in a ‘living and dynamic’ newly designed innovation touch and value maps, that need to evolve constantly over time in ecosystem design.

Part of my previous work, in understanding how to make innovation capabilities more dynamic, has taken me towards the end result to generate your new fitness landscapes, that follows ecosystem designs and thinking that are moving towards delivering a more sustaining ability to grow.

Through this fresh journey, I am exploring and exploiting a greater adaptive approach that constantly focuses on building the appropriate capabilities and competencies to undertake different challenges in variable collaborations.

The real value is becoming (more) adaptive in design and capability understanding, that fits your immediate and longer-term needs. Ones that build up a capacity that gives this flexible, versatile and malleable design; an evolving, living ecosystem that constantly adjusts to give a new sustaining future of seeking out in different places growth and future value creation impact.

Over time and experiences, you clarify and deepen your innovation proactive principles, build-out ecosystem thinking and see co-creation as the new value and impact route and make this a constant “living and dynamic” touch and value map.

I do enjoy my journey of discovery, I just wish I had even more time to explore it. My wish is to deploy this thinking in future client work on this connected approach.

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Structure of Keynote for Energy System Change

In twenty-odd minutes, Thomas Kiessling outlined to an audience of knowledgeable Energy experts his seven points to help prepare an energy company to make a transforming change.

By using specific examples of the needs in Electricity and the Grid Edge to underline the changes needed to be undertaken, he “fleshed out” these seven steps by recognizing all the seven do need to be embraced collectively.

Thomas Kiessling is the CTO of Siemens Smart Infrastructure, and within his keynote at the Enlit Europe event, held in Milan between 30th November to 2nd December 2021, provided seven needs for transitional change to prepare any energy company “As all of us will go through disruption and opportunity.”.

The primary point of his keynote I covered in a more extensive review here of “how to prepare as an Energy Company for significant disruption.”

Kiessling said the industry “has entered a much greater degree of uncertainty. And uncertainty needs entrepreneurs; it needs trial and error, and it needs system-scale innovation.”

Today as we transform our power generation into renewables, we face ageing powerlines, struggling to add capacity, a lack of (real-time) awareness, difficulties in controlling the voltage, especially at the grid edge. His examples were limited due to time but solely to illustrate the need for a more comprehensive evaluation of his seven needs.

Kiessling points out the challenges ahead where a seven-fold increase in renewables is projected with still the overriding number one objective of having the security of supply and resilience within the system being paramount.

The Seven Transition Needs to prepare as an Energy Company

Firstly today, the need is to apply cutting edge technology.

Transition need one: The security of supply, resilience, and automation

Using specific examples of where applying cutting edge technology will give this security of supply, resilience and automation.

Point One: Kiessling points out we will see less inertia and less short circuit power in the networks. There will need to be more sophisticated fault detection algorithms. Kiessling believes there is a need is to change the network protection architecture of the network itself. For example, the overcurrent and distance protection might need to be substituted by differential protections. AI technology will help to do this.

The good news here suggested by Thomas Kiessling is that AI and Analytics are well on their way to help in this transformation to control and operate the network in a “real-time” fashion. This shift in managing the system’s demands becomes a major transiting challenge.

Point two made here was shifting from static monitoring to a more dynamic setup. The present static load flow calculation to operate the network needs different thinking. As rotating masses are progressively removed, it will require different approaches with renewables towards a more dynamic data-driven environment.

Kiessling liked this, in an interesting comparison, to “resembling a patient-monitoring system during heart surgery” – one that was dynamic, self-healing and would evolve into a “system of systems”. This monitoring system needs to understand the system’s metrics in a real-time fashion to understand if dangerous situations are coming over the network to respond to these.

Point three– the need for self-healing networks. Closed-loop switching to help isolate and restore network segments in fast fashions and applies a different total fault metric to this.

The need comes to the point of a system of systems for semi-autonomous parts of the network, driven by renewables can then manage themselves and contribute to the overhaul resilience of the network, so it becomes a “resilient, decentralized and autonomous system”.

These transitions will need industry cooperation to mature these technologies and set all the energy systems up for the planned and expected growth.

As pointed out in the keynote- we all need to learn how to deal with data, and this is a cultural change where the need for data scientists, data lakes and IT/OT need to come together in new, radically different ways.

Transition need 2: Digitalization and Data

The challenge is validating and enriching the data to make it useable.

One example provided here is how Smart Meters are now going beyond just billing, but a deeper verification for providing data that increases the awareness of the network of power consumption, specifically on the grid edge. This shift enables improved metrics, planning and operational management for capacity planning, better aggregation insights, forecasting potential, ultimately improving the industry’s capital efficiencies and allowing the prosumer to participate.

Transition need 3: Innovation and proactivity

Kiessling’s example here was the use of power electronics; inverter-based resources will inform and stabilize the grid and protect the infrastructure.

The massive opportunities here are system-scale innovation and reinvention, yet there are three fundamental issues to tackle for shifting to inverters that need innovation and collaboration.

1. Inverters from different manufacturers require generic inverter models, enabling standardization to achieve a rotator-free network across the industry.
2. Challenge two: In more significant transmission scenarios, the inverters are located at a larger distance, increasing the risk of more weakly damped oscillations. Therefore, we need accurate simulation models and algorithms and present challenge
3. The issue of time-varying eigen modes is a challenge to be addressed. As the generation changes between conventional and inverter-based (or renewable) generation from hour to hour, the oscillatory behaviour of your power system will change, this requires an operator support system that continuously analyses the dynamics, and if needed, the power system needs to adjust on the fly to secure N-1 failure security.

One example offered within the keynote was operating, simulating and monitoring islands (actual physical islands) as rotation free, here Siemens has several larger-scale projects around the world.

In conclusion, to get to a rotation, free network in most countries calls for a system scale innovation for the energy community to work together to resolve and scale these specific challenges.

Transition need 4: Dealing with Cooperation at all levels

For example, TSOs and DSOs must cooperate more to cope with volatile inputs from renewables

Offered following the keynote to explain this cooperation point Kiessling gave a concrete example of how such cooperation can help speed progress to carbon-free networks:

With less and less TSO control of conventional power plants and rotating masses, the TSO’s mission to secure grid balance will be harder to achieve. The TSO has no direct control over RES at the distribution grid. That’s where DSO comes into play. The DSO can react to TSO control signals, effectively providing ancillary services by aggregating DER and DSR. This allows operators to reduce TSO side issues like redispatch, which has increased dramatically in some countries in recent years

In one of Siemens research projects cooperating with multiple TSOs / DSOs, this work has verified this works using actual network data of TSOs, and are now working on deploying this with several TSOs

Transition need 5: Standardization and scalability

The keynote comes back to evolving into this vision of a system of systems. The system will resemble more of a system of systems, where energy nodes will take autonomous decisions that contribute to overall grid stability, only possible with standardization among nano, Micro, distribution and transport grids.

Standardization matters because larger power systems will have many grid-forming inverters from different vendors. There is a need to harmonize cyber security standards to ensure a common level of cyber security for the entire interconnected energy system and cooperation between TSO and DSO for ancillary services and transport grid balance requires interconnection standards.

Transition need 6: Regulations for flexible investment plans

As pointed out by Thomas Kiessling we need a regulatory environment that builds digitalization into incentive frameworks. To build on this

We need to simplify data collection across the industry already at the point of asset registration and there need to be energy data best practices that are embraced by operators

To speed innovation, regulators should give grid infrastructure stakeholders (including equipment manufacturers) access to past operational data so they can model solutions. At present, the network operators often have a hard time getting innovation investments approved by regulators, even as research projects with part of the issues coming from digitalization investment, by nature, will lead to a certain amount of innovative trial and error, as is the case of every innovation.

Such an investment is in competition with simply adding hardware assets most of the time with a fixed rate of asset capital return. The regulator and the DSO understand this process much better. One way to evolve this logic is to start looking at business outcomes.

What is the asset base needed to deliver a given amount of energy? Capital efficiency incentives need to be introduced into the discussion. The flexibility to deploy Opex or Capex needs to be increased.

Here lies a cultural and transformational problem, as regulators have been “engrained” to approve and measure in a certain way, to apply known metrics or handed down-regulation requirements to safeguard energy.

You have to start with “what do we dare in the industry?”, “what do we focus upon?” and how can all involved in the energy transition collaborate, learn and work together.

Transition need 7: Consumer/prosumer focus

It is forecasted that Distributed Energy Resources will grow sevenfold by 2030. At a changing grid edge, data is (simply) not there, to prove that investment or change. How can this be changed? What help within the evolving grid edge can provide a change that allows for the transformation to take shape?

So, what if you could estimate the status of LV lines based on a combination of real-time data available typically at the substation level, plus meter data, even if you get that meter only once a day or periodically

Siemens is working with DSOs on pilots to use neural networks to estimate if and where voltage issues arise both on load and the DER supply side. These methods achieve better transparency, enabling the DSO to curtail less and authorize more new loads like EV chargers.

This information, combined with peak shaving, load shifting, storage systems to smooth out supply and demand, will go a long way to accommodate new loads and prosumer systems.

Thomas Kiessling’s suggestion is in the application of Neural Networks- “Achieving more informed decisions.”

The possible solution to make changes in the Grid Edge is to use substation data alongside offline smart meters. That data can be extrapolated to identify hotspots and load needs and becomes a Network Grid Edge.

This approach avoids having more sensors on every meter or connecting point to save time and expense. It can be pushed out over time and experience to connect into the final energy-consuming point.

This proposal made by Thomas Kiessling can provide a more apparent determination of the grid edge’s state and provide the state of the LV network for more informed decisions and (more targeted) capital investment.

So here, innovation and creative thinking are being applied to solve a current problem holding back the needed Grid Edge shift to the intelligent use of consumption and demand data. Insights gained will improve the knowledge on the network without deployment at scale of sensors to provide an assessment of data close to demand.

So, in the conclusion of Thomas Kiessling’s Keynote.

We are in a disruptive phase; Kiessling provided a transformation list of needs to follow in his keynote, specifically working through issues and challenges in the transmission, distribution, and Grid Edge networks. He gave many rich examples that are already shifting Energy and Grid Edge design. These offered radically different ways to manage the demand and supply, reflecting the changing nature of power generation, distribution and grid edge supply.

Thomas Kiessling’s final comment was the need to “wrap our minds around it” to undergo such a disruptive time of profound system change. It is how the energy community comes together and finds ways to imagine, collaborate to learn and share.

I found the suggestion of each Energy Company working through these seven transition needs (or evaluations) as a convenient starting point to bring the changes needed into a suggested “collective” whole to manage the energy transition in each company.

A more comprehensive review of the keynote is here.

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