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:
Solutions that tackle today’s more complex challenges lie in ecosystem and platform thinking and designing.
What is changing and why?
The first recognition or growing realization is that the structure of our businesses today cannot afford to try and stand alone. The new design needs to extend beyond traditional supporting partners, to learn to collaborate with a whole new range of partners, even some that were previously competitors.
“By connecting all the known parts, you begin to reveal a new unknown to explore and research.
Through increasing exchanges and collaborations, you then can find the solutions to make the unknown suddenly becomes known and valuable”
The second recognition is that organizations must radically adapt and become more agile to the different world we live in, to learn differently, explore and extract knowledge and translate it into new, exciting ways that give new value and impact. We all need to become highly adaptive so we can offer greater impact and value in what we offer.
“I want to separate agile from the software push side, empowering small teams, into this agility for organizations to coalesce around “great” ideas.
We all need to learn or hone new skills, be this sense-making, novel, and adaptive thinking, developing deeper social intelligence and managing new media literacy.”
The third recognition is the moving from the present position of offering specific products and services (developed by one single entity) into a collaborating one, where they are part of an ecosystem of partners enabling the ability to harness a diversity of experiences and knowledge has the potential to build great value-added new solutions.
“When we combine the collective knowledge in a network of collaborators, we dramatically advance the solutions, unlocking previously intractable problems”
The fourth recognition comes radically from this “connecting experience” against discrete products building upon the delivery of totally different value propositions for the ultimate consumer, which is a highly daunting challenge.
Achieving connected experience ‘upends’ much, if not all, of how our business organizations have been organized around today, mostly within themselves, in a very linear fashion. This is needing radical change. It calls for bold management to instigate such a transformation to offer these different collaborative exchanges and be highly adaptive in learning and responding by building solutions that meet customer expectations and needs. We need to shift to “higher-impact” organizations.
“the work environment needs to be redesigned with three goals in mind, so we can tackle increasingly higher-impact challenges, strengthen those higher-impact connections to deliver on these challenges and thirdly, be in the right shape to amplify the impact”
We are all required to become Ecosystem thinkers and designers
Ecosystems that are designed to produce ultimately new business models, that rest on a large capacity for agility, openness, and mutual dependency. Build in an environment of sharing and appreciating the values amongst a peer group that all relate to this ‘need for change’ and buy into that collective vision outlined. You are moving toward “collective ingenuity”
“In the future, taking technology & digital understanding, feed it greater human ingenuity, we give it real intelligence”
We are facing tough challenges within the business world.
To work through these often seemingly complex challenges we are all being asked to undertake is hard, often slow, frustrating work. The need to be engaged with the potential and return for all this energy and resources that it requires, needs recognition and individual and collective respect.
How and where innovation fits will clearly depend on this transforming effect. We are fairly clear that incremental innovation is just not cutting through to give the types of growth expected. There are many outside our existing organizations, standing impatiently at the gates, waiting to come in and take over with market breaking concepts through different business models.
“The value of breaking down long-standing boundaries is occurring with or without you. Barriers are dissolving as more recognize the need and value of coalescing around a networked ecosystem.
The chances for greater, more radical innovation to grow the business comes from exploring mutual opportunities to capture new economic value”
We need to transform, be disrupted or certainly re-imagine and this is where knowing your ecosystem comes in.
Ecosystem thinking and design form the connections and technology and people build the nodes and operating platforms for it to thrive and expand.
Our existing organization needs to envisage a changing world full of disruption that calls for radical change. To meet different challenges, to be highly adaptive it needs to begin to organize around ecosystems to deliver on a vision that recognizes it must be part of a greater collaborating network to thrive in this highly connected world.
“Ecosystems that produce ultimately new business models often rest on a large capacity for agility, openness, and mutual dependency, sharing and appreciating the values amongst a peer group that all relate to this ‘need for change’ and buys into that collective vision outlined”
Recognizing the power and makeup of Ecosystems & Platforms
An ecosystem that is made up of a broad, diverse group of partners, who all value each other and where each can bring to a final set of solutions added value that has the combined potential to redefine new markets can be exciting and empowering.
Collaboration that transforms current offerings within the participating organizations with the partners within the ecosystem each contributing and working on a designated platform, pushing each other’s ‘edges’ of understanding, to radically alter the value proposition and deliver a new customer experience. A tantalizing prospect, full of innovation.
“Networks of collaborators that work towards transforming current offerings within each of the participating organizations, each contributing their piece and working on a designated platform, pushing each other’s ‘edges’ of understanding, to radically alter the value proposition and deliver new customer experience”
Today we do have this tantalizing prospect, full of innovation promise, well within our reach with today’s technology potential. We are living in a connected, constantly adapting, world where networks and relationships are the essential wiring connections, we all need to construct.
Adapting to collaborating and never being fully in control can be unnerving.
In the past, we adapted to meet that specific requirement of that one dominant organization as they controlled the process, dictated the value chain, and determined the result they felt was the right one, but not anymore.
Today you can argue differently, why what you see as needed is not the best managed alone, it needs a collaborative effort, as the final arbitrator is the consumer, and they have increasingly demanding needs.
As an idea or concept evolves the more you flesh this out, it changes with this fresh input, energy, and understanding but it needs greater engagement and collaboration to meet these increased customer experience demands.
“As you open yourself up to collaborating you open yourself up for greater learning and from this you can reshape your business design to adjust to this changing reality we are finding within a business; the need for designing our business into business ecosystems, to offer greater growth”
The Status Quo is history, we need to break free of our existing chains
Breakthrough innovation needs a very different level of focused leadership that sees the real value of a connected future and is willing to drive through the changes this will take and the risks it can mean. The status quo offers no hiding place.
Setting about changing any status quo is tough, seeing something totally different, in a larger context and in a more sharing partnership calls for radical shifts in thinking. We must develop those “sense and respond” capabilities, build a greater capacity to “read and react” far more, and then we need to “learn and leverage” what this all means in new potential by placing this into a context that has greater value than the existing ways.
“The promise needs to be clear, it allows for far more breakthrough innovation, and greater challenging of the existing status quo to gain that substantial competitive advantage but it will constantly take organizations out of their existing comfort zones”
The result we are needing to deliver is increasingly calling for constructing innovative solutions in distinctly different highly connected ways, that are built from contributions from a broader ecosystem of vested parties, into solutions that offer really different, radical new customer experiences they really can value and meets their needs.
As we think of ecosystems, we need to think differently.
Think carefully through any move to join innovation ecosystems, they do have potentially a high, immensely attractive return if managed well, and are highly valuable to the participants; yet they are nearly always disruptive to the existing markets and require immense focus and resourcing to make a transformation really happen.
“I certainly believe the ecosystem approach will increasingly become the main value-producing stream for innovation delivery.
Platforms, strategic partnerships, and new business models all will be on the agenda of any serious global organization and ecosystems are the organizing environment to enact these”
Yet the prize can be a sustainable competitive position unable to be matched due to this ecosystem of vested parties, seeking out new, unique positions that offer greater value and impact than on offer today.
“This is the time to understand what Ecosystem thinking and designing really means in implications and potential outcomes that have greater impact and sustaining value”
The promise of those new exciting results beckons
Results that allow machines to talk to other machines, inform humans, anticipate problems, combine and fix problems, build understanding to inform the next generation, have a digital twin, to operate remotely or in harmony.
We have ways to take where we are in our technology and digital understanding and feed it through human ingenuity and the collected knowledge found in a network of collaborators to advance the solution, to unlock previously intractable problems. This is where the new innovation era will thrive, in any industry – the power of connected innovation.
“Connected innovation comes from Ecosystem Thinking and Platform Designs”
The value of breaking down long-standing boundaries is occurring with or without you. Barriers are dissolving as more business organizations recognize the need and value of coalescing around a networked ecosystem.
The chances for greater, more radical innovation to grow the business come from exploring mutual opportunities to capture new economic value.