Seizing breaking opportunities, dealing with disruptions, and delivering on more demanding customer needs are raising the complexity of managing today in our business environments.
The growing recognition is the need to build flexible ecosystems; of partners where access to a diverse on-demand set of talent, knowledge, expertise, resources and capabilities needs a broad approach in today’s world to meet these complex challenges they seem to multiply daily.
In thinking and design, ecosystems offer a different growth path and stability than the previous “go it alone”. Engagements with partners can offer shared data, new, fresh insights, the ability to share costs, shared operation experiences, and expertise to help build new approaches to more ‘connected’ collaborative innovation.
The ability to tackle complexity needs a different approach to sharing risk, taking appropriate steps to evolve, and engaging more broadly with customers, consumers, citizens, and concepts, chasing a different value and meaning for all involved.
Industry ecosystems are still in their early stages of discovering the optimum solution; in configurations, knowing the network needs for capability, capacity, support, expertise, and knowledge to achieve the necessary sustaining difference investments like these entail.
When organizations need to extend and open up their innovation into collaborations and operation sharing with partners requires significant trust, clear and robust governance, and a collective shared purpose of who contributes in paying in and who takes out the gains.
Ecosystems need a level of equitable value, or they fail to move beyond the concept stage. The process and discovery of what works and doesn’t is a learning journey where flexibility and adaptiveness figure hugely.
Industry landscapes are rapidly changing, and the level of dynamics in complexity and working to counter the disruptive forces needs constant scaling up and down. The partners for one challenge may be significantly different from another challenge.
Organizations that attempt to build their own platforms, believing this gives them an ongoing advantage, might find themselves locked out of different initiatives by taking this ownership position.
Platforms might be better managed independently of the ecosystems formed to tackle different challenges. Expansion, collaboration, and innovation need to remain highly flexible.
What we see emerging has been monitored in some useful future industry ecosystem predictions built up by the International Data Corporation (IDC). In two surveys, one for 2022 predictions and one for 2023, IDC shows how industrial ecosystems will evolve over three to four years.
I have been looking at these predictions and will summarize these in a future post.
The prediction that catches the eye is that organizations that share data, applications, and operations with their ecosystem will realize a 3 to 5% higher revenue increase than those that chose not to participate in ecosystem collaborations.
The second one is the growing recognition or the next step for those already investing to incorporate partners from outside the core industry, learning best practices more openly in sharing and exchanging, and adding assets, resources, and knowledge that may not be present today within their core industry.
The different predictions make up the top ten predictions for each of the years 2022 and 2023, showing a fast-evolving expansion of industry ecosystem thinking and design.
“Build and they will come” is far too static and lacking; the market needs of today and in the future will require far more dynamic, fast-evolving, multiple ecosystems that are central to any design and changing adoption strategy.
Ecosystem designs point towards the future. Are you adapting and adopting to the very different demands and thinking these will be needed to shape very different organizations in the future?
Why not reach out and have a chat? This might be critical to your future.