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.
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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.
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Managing Governance within Ecosystem Designs
Governance needs to constantly “account” for change. Here is a handy reference or reflection of its capacity to deliver:
You need a living environment, one that evolves constantly
+ Here, you must establish a relational, institutional and coordination set of strategic and operational approaches. The “living” document needs to reflect on the constant reshaping of the ecosystem as it evolves and recognize that this is a constantly evolving design.
+ Governance needs to articulate the influencing and coordinating mechanisms, their different levels, and the protocols and procedures to resolve any disputes or pathway directions all would need to follow and adhere to.
+ It needs to determine the boundary conditions and if and when these change, which they are most likely to, there is a mechanism in place to recognize this and determine any new scope, direction or design to be accepted going forward.
+ A governance document must have built into it sufficient commonality and be transparent in its spirit of amiability to coordination and decision-making.
+ It needs to determine the critical driving forces but equally reflect on the different catalyzing forces in tensions and design that individual members will attempt to impose, so there needs a resolution method to be able to go back and refer to.
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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.”
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.” Continue reading
Siemens Smart Infrastructure Grid Edge Summit
Siemens Smart Infrastructure offers many different solutions to achieving this change at the energy grid edge. Recently, to amplify this, they have been holding a conference over two days entitled “the grid edge summit“.
You can still register here as the event is available for some time to view and explore. It would help in understanding their solutions if you visited their different energy topic areas. Here Siemens offers you a significant range of choices, solutions and advice on Grid Edge topics to give you time to check out some of the #GridEdge tech & solutions.
These topics and solutions are organized under decarbonization and sustainability, distributed energy solutions, the integration of renewable energy resources, mobility charging, and the consulting and financing solutions available to utilize. The main conference event is a series of talks and panels exploring the topics above.
One panel I particularly enjoyed was “Financing Decarbonization.” Continue reading
https://theconversation.com/humanitys-sustainability-is-no-excuse-for-abandoning-planet-earth-80699
I have been reading a groundbreaking report, the world’s first comprehensive study on how to achieve a“Net-Zero by 2050: a roadmap for the global energy system“(referred to as NZE here in this link). It is produced by the International Energy Agency (IEA)
Why is this so important? Well, it is about the most dramatic change in our Energy Systems globally and emphasised that this decade is pivotal to reaching the targeted goal of net-zero by mid-century. Each decade will bring dramatic change to all of our lives. Our planet is under significant threat of global warming that will impact how we can live and perhaps survive.
This 2050 target is in line with the 2015 Paris Agreement, the foundations of global consensus to limit the rise in global temperature to 1.5c. This requires nothing short of a total transformation of the energy systems, a complex “beast” that provides us with the basic energy sources we need to survive, live, build and grow.
The report sets out a cost-effective and economically productive pathway, resulting in a clean, dynamic and resilient energy economy dominated by renewables like solar and wind instead of fossil fuels. The report also examines key uncertainties, such as the roles of bioenergy, carbon capture and behavioural changes in reaching net zero.
The Energy System is a complex Ecosystem. Continue reading
Ecosystems hold a certain fascination for me. The ecosystem approach can tackle and help resolve some of the more complex issues we face.
We increasingly use the word “ecosystem” to describe our environment that we operate with, but we are often diluting its true positioning.
Truly unique ecosystems are hard to find and certainly to manage. One I really feel reflects a collaborative model worth explaining is the ones that are forming around Hydrogen as the alternative energy vector based on renewables. To replace or become a significant part of any entrenched energy system requires a system design approach. This part of the energy transition fits within the ‘greater’ energy system design.
Let’s look at this with some context and then clarify that approaching Hydrogen needs a unique Ecosystem design. We are presently building a unique ‘nested’ Hydrogen Ecosystem within the Energy Transition. It is interesting to explore, firstly here and then in a follow-up post on one of its specific parts. Continue reading
The global challenge of climate change is coming rapidly to the points where it is forcing governments, businesses and knowledge organisations all over the world to mobilise behind carbon-reducing innovations, e.g. large-scale renewable energy implementation and electrification.
When it comes to innovation and leading the energy transition, Europe is showing clear leadership and in one specific and important technology, a global leader in electrolysis technology required to produce green hydrogen. The challenge today is to convert that leading position into a sustaining best of class one, that leads the world in electrolyzer expertise, production and research.
Today, Europe has a promising start, but it has significant challenges to break down the silo’s of knowledge and expertise and seize this opportunity to learn how to collaborate and build a thriving, robust and collaborative ecosystem around the building of a world-leading position in the electrolyzer market space.
At this time though, despite a promising outlook for the use of the eölectrolyzer for hydrogen, water electrolysis technology is not sufficiently mature to fit that purpose. It still is at a limited scale and is not yet at the point of the expectations building up around it. An enormous challenge lies ahead in upscaling currently available technologies to GW-scale factories required to drive forward the energy transition. Continue reading
There is far more focus on the consumer platform market where Facebook, Alibaba, Google, etc. all get the publicity and consequential high valuations to their business models. Yet, the size of the Industrial Platform market will be bigger, perhaps not in “eyeballs” but far more in economic value and growth to those that commit to these changes by collaborating through a networked designed platform ecosystem.
Redesigning a specific industry space to adapt and adjust to a platform business model is hard work. The investment in years of building internal systems is rapidly becoming worrying “legacy” issues. The new way to perform in business is through open, collaborative networks of collaborators that achieve far more growth potential by participating in an ecosystem of partners.
Strategic Industrial relationships are radically changing Continue reading