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.

We need to experiment openly, open ourselves up to external advice, and become involved in different offerings to learn and build our understanding of how these can work (for us and others). Platforms, strategic partnerships, and new business models will all be on the agenda of any serious global organization.

To learn to deliver valuable innovation through an ecosystem-designed approach requires a radically different innovation system of management, built around adapting and changing our thinking towards ecosystems by design.

Innovation will move from being based on incremental innovation, all designed in-house, single entity outcomes, into bold, collaborative offerings, cutting across today’s established industry boundaries and pushing out across different innovation frontiers.

There is a need to encourage a more radical innovation approach to achieve this shift in innovation. This new level of innovation capability requires participating on various platforms and extracting in different ways across multiple ecosystems to meet your aims and align these with others.

Radical innovation calls for a more deliberate design, constantly adapting, adjusting and applying agile thinking in highly collaborative open ways. It will demand a very different set of disciplines, processes, and design. This will open up the whole need to re-evaluate the governance, the risk management and the resources needed to operate in this new innovating world.

Broader collaborations will become central for future organizations to find ways to cooperate, network and build relationships that recognize the partnership value to achieve a sustainable, future business that offers impact and connected design for customers to value that meets their changing needs.

Aligning partners on a platform needs-basis is very different from aligning them to just one organization’s needs. In the past, we adapted to meet that specific requirement of that one dominant organization as they controlled the process.

Today you can argue differently why what you see as needed is not the best and maybe different than first envisaged, and it is better and evolutionary but demands more change and disruption internally.

Ecosystem design allows for more breakthrough innovation, provides a greater challenge to the existing status quo, and often takes organizations out of their comfort zones.

There is so much to explore and build around innovation ecosystem design.

Innovation in a highly collaborative world is exciting to explore, learn and attempt to translate into the future innovation designs we need, built on highly collaborative concepts.

• Thinking about ecosystems does allow us to go out of our normal scope of invention, innovation and being creative. The organization that envisages a changing world needs to organize around ecosystems to deliver on that vision to gain the leading influencer’s position.
• Making Sustainability central to our future innovation capability building will be through adopting a new open ecosystem approach. The future of collaborations can increasingly share previously idle or under-utilized assets; it can extend the life and extract idle knowledge often locked in one organization.
• Ecosystems built around specific platform designs are the future of innovation that takes designs and solutions into a new realm of opportunity, built on collaborative engagement and joint missions. As we learn, we adapt, and as we share, we grow.
• Ecosystems require increased interactions within the community and need more tightly controlled activities to gain the synergies and effects of working within any networked system. Relationship management needs to keep focusing on enhancing, driving innovation and knowing how to adapt this within the whole concept—no easy task.
• Ecosystems that produce new business models rely on a large capacity for agile thinking within the participating organizations. Internal capabilities and competencies get highly stretched by the new dynamics; you need a strong ecosystem orchestrator to manage these challenges and many cultural biases that can blind existing lines of sight.
• Ecosystem innovation today is more about managing beyond the immediate known found within one organization’s limited focus of the world. The race is to gain an advantage and often try to dominate and influence the future direction a market will take.
• This new ecosystem thinking requires a broader perspective and a greater diversity of thought by tapping into varying levels of specialized expertise. For innovation, you need to extend your view, push the boundaries and make sure you can connect all the parts for it to grow and develop.

Advancing our innovation activity is the exciting part of designing a new business ecosystem. It is building and learning, evolving a design of an ecosystem that has the potential to ‘create’ something different and transform a germ of an idea into something living, breathing and valued, a set of tangible innovative outcomes.

As we think about ecosystems, we need to think differently.

Are you exploring this innovation dynamic of platforms and ecosystems yet? It is even more dramatic in change than moving from closed to open innovation; it will challenge how we undertake business.

The business will need to be radically redesigned, based on a new organizational architecture, to embrace a more open, collaborative environment where dependency lies in partnerships outside your existing organization. You need to get into a position to experiment, test, exploit and explore in limited ways to learn and adapt.