Category Archives: Innovation Ecosystems

Seeing innovation differently through ecosystem thinking and design

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Thinking of innovation as an innovation ecosystem in design

We need to re-think innovation and provide a new level of innovation integration and optimization.

What we see increasingly is the need to change to a different thinking, one of what “innovation ecosystems.” can provide.

In designing these innovation ecosystems, we might have the potential answer to overcoming and giving innovation that chance to be more central to the core of the business. It might offer us the ability to connect much of the rich internal knowledge with that outside one, that other organizations and individuals can provide, in diversity, or thought or contribution.

I envisage an ecosystem of working upon like-minded goals and ambitions, by collaborating for delivering a new form of innovation value. Collaborating in ecosystem thinking and design I would suggest opens up significant potential and combinations, that provide added value and significant opportunity for improvement on the existing offerings.

Approaching innovation on a common, shared technology platform can significantly enhance the discovery, experimentation, exploring and exploiting diverse skills and expertise through to commercialization.

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The difficulties of adoption for the business platform

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The adoption process

I want to relate adoption back to business platforms and anchor it in the process.

Today business platform adoption is a struggle. It needs a clear revisiting of the theory of diffusion and adoption to extract the relevant points of necessary practice.

What is vitally needed is the recognition that deciding on adopting a business platform approach has five stages or decision points to go through.

So often, platform providers automatically go to the assumption that their platform will be adopted. It simply will not without working through and gaining confirmation the five stages of adoption are clarified.

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Exploring points of value in adopting Business Platforms.

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Business Platforms provide the backbone of the Network.

Today we are still caught up in the validation and relevance of managing a business through platform thinking by making the business case of its value and impact. We should not be; it is time for you to hop onto the train.

The ability to present a compelling business case for the use and application of platforms is overwhelming. I think I have well over 100 plus arguments for their use, value, impact and application.

For me, platforms are needed as we face a very different economic landscape.

We need to choose where to focus in the future, where to concentrate our resources and attempt to bridge the fragmentation that is occurring. The world of collaboration, where we can find partners to share and reinforce what we do, is leading to new dynamics of combining.

Platforms are more viable and relevant.

Platforms allow you the opportunity to innovate in very different ways. They can add value through collaborations that can add more to the internal efficiency options through learning and sharing. Platforms help manage the difficulties of transitions we are all undergoing and change how we see the world through a broader collaborative set of lenses. Continue reading →

Siemens Xcelerator Part Two- what it does

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Siemens Xcelerator Digital Business Platform

A Series of Posts exploring the what, why and how of Xcelerator- part two

In this series, I felt there is a need for a deepening or exploring of what Siemens Xcelerator is all about. What are the implications and value opportunities for customers, distributors, partners, or analysts?

My aim in three separate posts all linked here is to explore the Siemens Xcelerator, a new Digital Business Platform, firstly what it is, secondly, what it does and thirdly, how it does it.

These three posts are “looking into” Siemens. I am looking from the outside to see the value of this launch announcement of the Siemens Digital Business Platform. The launch proposal offers much. The first post I recommend reading provides context to “what Siemens Xcelerator is.”

This post is about “what it does,” from my perspective.

The real key here is the open connections between solutions and all engaged parties in the interactions

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Siemens launches Xcelerator for navigating the digital transformation

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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.”

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Designing a new business ecosystem for greater innovation

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The three critical ecosystems combine for sustaining business advantage

Today’s challenge is to build the organizational capacities to be different, sustained and accelerate the critical aspect that innovation, ingenuity and creativity can provide and make sure they are equipped for supporting lasting, sustainable growth that comes from a purposefully designed business ecosystem.

Applying ecosystem thinking offers you the collaborative ability to extend beyond more traditional channels of delivery, often just restricted to only utilizing your existing infrastructure, sales channels and networks of partners. Building a more open business ecosystem allows you to search and build on others’ specialization into that “greater” innovation potential.

Today to set about and build a business ecosystem, the significant application and the use of technology, the cloud and a diverse set of collaborations will increasingly become the mainstream for innovation inputs, accelerants, and the delivery of value. Continue reading →

Gearing up for sustainability in business is becoming core

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Sustainability is the new growth core in business change

Sustainability is near the very top or close to the top of any forward-looking board’s agenda. The board is recognizing the growing concerns of several “intertwined issues” that are needing significant recalibrating and is forcing them to think beyond asking “how can we thrive and survive, into how can we build a sustainable pathway for value, growth and impact?”.

Where does our business fit within and alongside society, both in who we serve and society in general, coupled with realising that the planet is heading towards a critical crisis. Today, we need to account for the impacts of heat, flooding, water shortages, health and food issues and what we can do to reduce these pressures? How can each of us make a contribution to becoming more sustainable?

There are growing impact points that are harder to separate, they are increasingly becoming intertwined. The economy for a business to function and be profitable, an environment that is climate and nature friendly and thirdly, the growing considerations for a broader range of people to serve, support or inform the social and corporate values come increasingly together.

We live in a connected world mutually dependent on nature, our environment, in sharing and valuing that we only thrive and survive if we collaborate and cooperate. Continue reading →

The combination effect of ecosystems, platforms, marketplaces and portfolios

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Combination effect of combining ecosystems, platforms, marketplaces and portfolios into the organizations future thinking and design

Today we need a completely different type of thinking for designing our business future, one that is highly collaborative, a design thinking approach, to give the “combination effect” of ecosystems, platforms, marketplaces and portfolios.

We need to recognize the value of taking an Ecosystem thinking and design approach.

For far too long business organizations have been trapped in their own silos of thinking and collaborating, achieving only their one perspective of what a market or their customers need

Often this relied on time-consuming research or focus groups and the outcomes were often flawed as the sample size was too small, the market dynamics were evolving and shifting and research of this nature often lags. Also, often executives operate at a significant distance from the market itself to lose that essential contact.

Equally, to quantify the research you often had to make given assumptions or have more advanced prototypes to show and gauge the reaction and thinking. This tended to take you back into a loop of the redesign adding further conflicting views and opinions.

Today we can’t afford such a layered, sequential, and linear system as the competition has become faster, it comes from any point of the globe and advances at a pace it is hard to track and respond to without a highly adaptive, responsive business model design.

We still talk of fast followers and laggards but this has one dangerous assumption, we all want to be like each other and that, will eventually spin us into the race to the bottom. Continue reading →

Ecosystems and Platforms, the new collaborative business need.

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Today business organizations are having to face the stark truth, either they adapt or die. If they adapt they accept a need for a radical redesign to extend their organization’s ability to open up in highly collaborative thinking ways. Today there is a real need to seek out higher impact and value opportunities to build a more sustainable business future.

“We are in the era of ecosystem and platforms to be central to our business future”

Changing how organizations have been structured and designed into something different, ones that are open, highly collaborative and sharing ideas and concepts with others to build more sustaining, value-adding business solutions is a significant change that needs to be contemplated and addressed.

It needs bold leadership to undertake a significant transformational journey. Technology offers them the transforming means but can they, as leaders, take their people with them?

Here is why they must: Continue reading →

Building trust in community relationships offers much

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Trust, dialogues and relationships often lead to new breakthrough ideas

There is a realization today, far more than in the past, that greater trust in relationships builds not just from projecting forward aspirations and values, but also in gaining a greater community involvement.

This greater community involvement often leads to new collaborative breakthrough ideas not possible without this open sharing.

For example, if a business addresses its environmental footprint and works to change its social impact in ways to protect our planet it gains clear identification and association.

Trust comes from connecting shared values and providing the narrative of how this journey will be undertaken and asking others to help build this in collaborative engagement and shared platforms. Continue reading →