Look around you the cross-industry or community ecosystem is exploding.

Many of the changes that will emerge in the next twelve to twenty-four months will become more cross-industry and service ecosystems. The search is far more today looking for synergies.

Connecting into a Ecosystem is necessary to extract those collaborative synergies. It requires a host (platform provider), different apps, weblinks and consistent ways to integrate these so those using the airport or train station can navigate their way around their personal needs. It needs an ecosystem and platform management to bring this together.

We are increasingly expecting as consumers, uninterrupted connectivity, and virtual integration and that need for continued connectivity will spur new value propositions for technology and AI to take over and manage more of your daily, repetitive tasks. Continue reading

The building of a Hydrogen Ecosystem in Europe

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

The power of ecosystem thinking

“Opening up our thinking towards ecosystems will have a powerful effect,
it alters the way we will approach problems today and in the future”

Our whole understanding of innovation is changing; we are evaluating and changing our existing focus from closed (internal orientation) into open and far more collaborative innovation (external orientation) with our collective thinking offering the acceleration into improving our innovation performances, leading to higher chances of achieving greater impact and success.

The search is seemingly on to find greater value, which will increasingly coalesce around different innovation ecosystems.  We need to form in many different ways significantly more relationships that increasingly matter to each organization, that add value, insight, and bring external expertise inside to work on ‘greater’ innovation solutions.

We are creating the potential to deliver innovative products and services that would not be delivered by only having the one organization attempting it. Complexity is on the rise, offering discrete products is on the wane.

Firstly why are business ecosystems emerging as a real competitive force?

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What makes up a winning innovation ecosystem of design?

So what can be gained by adopting a more innovation ecosystem approach?

As we recognize and push out through more open networking and relationships, we are opening up to new learning. We sharpen our minds and attain smarter resources as this exposes ‘us’ to new fields of expertise and knowledge that we can absorb and translate into new innovation opportunities.

As we connect and integrate this learning, we are all becoming co-creators that can arrive at different defining and shape potential. By reaching out, we operate differently, we become more engaged and open.

Let me offer four connecting themes that are shifting our ways to operate and innovate that provide a far greater set of dynamics by ’embracing’ an ecosystem collaborative design approach.

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The Evolving Platform Strategies in the Industrial Space

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

Are innovation spillovers about to accelerate the course of the energy transformation?

Achieving clean energy technology innovations will be vital if we want to meet the goals of net-zero emissions in the next fifty years.

Innovation is central to the energy transition through new technology solutions.

Innovation can accelerate and achieve rapid reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases to anything near the net-zero goals set in the Paris Agreement of 2015 to hold the global average temperature to below 2oC of pre-industrial levels.

We need significant development and diffuse new technology solutions to displace existing energy assets to move towards a global economy based on clean energy.

As we look at any clean energy scenarios, it is highly reliant on moving concepts, through prototyping into a commercial demonstration. Presently many of the clean energy solutions rely on technologies that are present only in a prototype or early smaller demonstration-scale and will not come to a commercial scale without significant new R&D efforts.

There are also numerous concepts indicating promising technology solutions that have not been, as yet, commercially deployed in any mass-market way. Some scenarios looking out over the next thirty or more years are suggesting these critical technologies can make up to 75% of solving any cumulative CO2 emissions. Continue reading

Exploring the Innovation Technology in the Clean Energy Ecosystem

Anyone involved in the Energy world knows how complex it has become.

It seemed as we look back at the past; we had simply one power provider, using one fossil fuel, maximizing their dedicated infrastructure and transmission lines, to then deliver to their dedicated substations and then onto the eventual consumer or customer the needed electricity or heat supply. It is radically different today for numerous reasons.

Reality is, we need to undertake a radical redesign of our entire energy ecosystem.

The consensus is that over the next twenty to thirty years, we must undergo a drastic change in our whole energy systems.

Do we understand what this means? Can we grasp the complexity of this undertaking?

I think we have some real help in understanding this through how the International Energy Agency is going about tackling the complexity will significantly help; they have mapped the entire energy system. Continue reading

Needing three distinct Ecosystems within any Business Design

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

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

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

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

Designing our Innovation Ecosystems needs Five Considerations

Firstly we need to put any innovation ecosystem into context. What are ecosystems, and why they are really valuable to consider when you are thinking about a more radical approach to any new innovation design?

Ecosystems are ideal for coalescing around a complex challenge, one that attracts and draws in all potential players who can contribute to sharing and relating to the challenges/goals and possible solutions, collectively. One individual’s contribution can’t solve this on its own, it needs this collaborative environment.

Ecosystems are networks of interconnected organizations, organized around one focal point, firm, or platform. They have both producers (that add intellectual value) and user-side participants (that add their experience and need), all wanting to focus and advance new value through innovation.

In any ecosystem, there is this need to recognize the value building and creation are both found upstream (producing) and downstream (consuming). It is this searching for the ‘combined effect’ that offers the more significant potential of sustaining value, by approaching new innovation in this ecosystem design approach.

So what do we need to consider for entering into an innovation ecosystem design? Continue reading

Designing Ecosystems in Health Understanding

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

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

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

Taking health systems higher into whole health systems

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

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

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

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

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