Business is certainly changing

Regretfully many businesses are still caught in the change over from the past industrial era, we have not fully absorbed or translated the impact of the digital effect. The rising expectations from technology are ‘running way ahead’ of our ability to transform the organizations to be digitally ready.

We are in need of finding and developing environments that are far more connected and open, simple yet intelligent to reduce complexity, yet fast and scalable as the frequency and collaboration needs are changing, all placing increased demands on the organization.

With the consistent onslaught of social media, the potential of cloud computing and the increasing reliance on the mobile or smartphone, the pressure is on organizations to adapt and respond accordingly. The consumer expectations are dramatically shifting to expecting these connected experiences we have written about, they are seeking higher levels of personal gratification.

Everything is about “getting connected”.

Working in Ecosystems will change the nature of business activities

Ecosystems will have the potential to expand capabilities and enable experiences beyond anything possible today in the present ‘disconnected’ world, where technology is not playing a significant part. It is by the very nature of the interacting and interdependence in relationships that is driving this need of participating in an interconnected system.

We are all increasingly searching for designing new ways to do business, ones that are buildimng networks that are collectively finding, exchanging and looking to create and allocate new business value together. It is the need of acting together, that offers the potential for the outcomes to be greater than the sum of the individual parts and it will be technology driven.

Recognizing the significant changes underway let’s look at many parts of today’s environment that are coming together to make the conditions for a ‘perfect storm’ that we have to navigate through.

Multiple elements are combining to drive change and get us all to consider Ecosystem designs as a solution to reduce complexity.

• Business has a growing need for finding new competitive battle zones as they exhaust the traditional ones
• There are these higher risks of disruption happening today, across all industry sectors
• The scramble to scale and globalize is increasing the pressure for speed, adaptation, and new outlooks.
• Customers are more sophisticated and demanding, expectations and empowerment are on the rise.
• Customer experience is becoming more compelling, individualized and offering integrated experiences.
• Digital transformation, big data analysis and the ubiquity of information is changing the knowledge game
• Industry lines and conventions are blurring and merging through the need for technology and overhaul
• Power is shifting from single company offerings into platform offerings, built on collaboration needs
• The existing Business Model is increasingly under threat and shorter in its ‘shelf life’
• Collaborative Needs are increasingly the basis for achieving competitive advantage
• Reality is that every innovation and company is part of a broader, evolving ecosystem
• Our futures are far more intertwined and dependent on others
• Technology is leading us all in an unparalleled rate of change in most of what we do in our lives.
• The reinventing of the rules of competition have dramatically opened up (startups, venture capital etc)
• We all cannot navigate the future alone, we are becoming increasingly reliant and dependent.
• Technology offers business greater access to intelligence that is fast and scalable
• There is a shift in the economic equation to collaboration, transparency and customer engagement.

These shifts are altering the business environment and organizations have got to find solutions to address these, as these shifts are increasingly making the environment highly complex to navigate through. Ecosystem thinking holds a crucial key to managing this growing complexity, in radically connected ways.

Business Ecosystems are not new but they hold tremendous promise for innovation

Business Ecosystem thinking, although not new, is rapidly becoming the new organism to coalesce around to tackle growing complex challenges and a more demanding consumer. It has the mechanisms to encompass all necessary players to share and relate to the challenges and collectively work on solutions together, often in a growing world of complexity.