Category Archives: Sustainability

Orchestrating the New Ecosystem Business Design.

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There is a growing body of work about “orchestration” and its need in the business world. As we form a greater association with ecosystems as the business design, the orchestrator becomes central to its performance and success.

Orchestration has become synonymous with managing or dealing with (specifically) external partners. The need is to learn to cooperate to produce something different and original, usually in a platform and ecosystem arrangement.

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

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

Ecosystems offer us infinite possibilities

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The new environment providing by adopting ecosystem thinking offers us infinite possibilities. It opens us all up to new knowledge, collaboration and sources of new value and innovative impact.

We have new frontiers and unexploited opportunities everywhere when we push through today’s constraints. We have more connected hardware to open up our physical and digital realms, and thirdly we have access all the time to more real-world data than ever before—the birth of the digital and physical ecosystems that enable innovation like never before.

We have some awesome power available to us; can’t we unlock the potential to change where we seem to be heading? Continue reading →

Financing Decarbonization in Energy and Infrastructure

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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 →

Sustainability is the new growth core

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Since the current COVID-19 pandemic, the recognition and evaluation of sustainability have taken a much higher place in the boardrooms of our larger organisations. Much of this initial focus will improve the reporting around the ESG goals and establish their own performance in more confident ways. I would argue these are the basic building blocks of a fundamental change, recognizing that sustainability will become the core of the future business design.

As we have embraced digital change, much of the business landscape has shifted. Business is being more informed through the data and analysis it undertakes; it has relearned how to react in sustaining crisis (dealing with the pandemic) and validated different aspects of its business, recognizing it can function very differently. The ability to manage and support remote workers, dealing with an ongoing business outside the office environment, be remote in servicing customers digitally, and provide solutions through connected enterprises’ design have each changed perception and the realization that we can sustain and still grow in more collaborative, open ways.

Sustainability is rising to be top or close to the top of a boards agenda. The growing concerns of several intertwined issues that are needing significant recalibrating. 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 and what we can do to reduce these pressures? Continue reading →

The New Virtual Enterprises Building Blocks

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© Copyright IBM Corporation 2021

I have to say I loved reading this from the IBM Institute for Business Value. It provides a greater fit with much of what I was struggling to articulate in a recent post “Missing the building blocks of ecosystem design in the Energy Roadmap by IEA“; I can relate to what the IBM report conveys as the future way to organize and undertake business or to bring together all the parts of the Energy System roadmap suggested in the recent IEA report.

The report “The Virtual Enterprise – The Cognitive Enterprise in a virtual world.” gives a new view to managing in both virtual worlds and enterprises. I do recommend reading it.

To quote Mark Foster, Senior Vice President, IBM Services: Continue reading →

Sustainable Value Creation

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Sustainability has become a hot topic in the corporate board rooms across the globe in the past year. The World Economic Forum held a virtual forum for business leaders to determine a set of Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics – universal, comparable disclosures that focused on people, planet, prosperity and governance on which companies can report, regardless of industry or region. This was held in January 2020 with a direct result of a consultant paper “Toward Common Metrics and Consistent Reporting of Sustainable Value Creation being produced and discussed going forward.

This consultative work continued with a White paper in September 2021, “Measuring Stakeholder Capitalism Towards Common Metrics and Consistent Reporting of Sustainable Value Creation. 

Recently, this had a following on with a beneficial further white paper in March 2021 called “A Leapfrog Moment for China in ESG Reporting“, which provides all involved or interested in Sustainability to refer to. I will be coming back to this particular report at another time. What caught my attention was singling out China and how many of their leading organizations are undertaking sustainability into their corporate goals, plans and operations.

Within these three documents, you gain a handy set of insights to build a sustainable pathway. Continue reading →

How Open Is Open? Check it out.

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The broad use of ‘open’ does seem to have very different interpretations, especially when it comes to platforms or cloud-ready architecture.

Two examples for me in my research recently, needed some “airing” as the openness (excuse the pun) gives me a higher level of comfort. I wish others would state what openness really means in their offerings.

The two I have been drawn to are Aras and their open architecture platform for PLM and the other is Bosch with their IoT platform.

Let me take quotes from both to underpin that real clarity I believe the client would want before they go into a partnership. Today so much is banded about upon “lock-in” when you commit to platforms, it sort of scares of many potential clients wanting to have platform solutions, from making that investment. Trust and confidence in what you are actually signing up for, is needed to be fully transparent. Goes to say but is it?

In my view only having one platform provider is not the right path, it is a range of providers, selected because they can cater to your jobs and needs, not you having to fit into their architecture but it is this openness that significantly needs to be looked at closely. Continue reading →