Today, we need to transition through ecosystem thinking and designs, as we recognize the future value and impact for businesses to grow, is through collaborations and co-creation. We need to have a new open architecture for undergoing this transformation.

Making Sustainability central to innovation capability building in a new ecosystem designed way connects the parts into the future design.

Let me tell you my story and how it continues to evolve

Today’s challenge is to build the capacity to be different, to sustain the critical aspect that innovation can provide: the stimulus for sustaining lasting growth.

It is through continued open learning, capabilities become stronger and more difficult for competitors to understand and imitate. Capabilities grow through use and application in increasingly intensified ways. Knowledge explored, offers new knowledge gained.

Ecosystem thinking is becoming central to our future as we open up to greater co-creation and collaborations opportunities. I believe co-creation spreads risk, accelerates ideas into higher-value solutions, builds out on diversity within the connections and relationship network, increased awareness and focus, that have the “combination effect” of greater potential to give impact and value in returns, attuned far more to customer needs or market trends. Building the capacity to innovate in more open, ecosystem ways strengthens the business pathway to a sustainable future.

Today the aim is to build distinctive capabilities, which draw out the characteristics of the organization, attract collaborators that are like-minded and driven by finding greater value out of combining growing diverse expertise that cannot be replicated by others easily, motivated by spotting “first mover” advantage in the designs achieved.

Bringing together partners provide new competitive edges that the competition finds increasingly hard to replicate. It is through value creation that is increasingly built on a collaborative approach you achieve greater sustainability.

We all make transitions in our work

I am finding myself re-positioning to a “transition advocate” recognizing the combined effects of applying innovation, in ecosystems designs and thinking, looking to support clients for future sustainable solutions. 

Specifically, I am focusing on the industrial internet of things (IIoT) and energy systems that are radically changing our world.

Combining innovation, ecosystem and sustainability is a step change.

Here is how I see this emerging new way of going about business that I am figuring out how to undertake:

• Transformational insights need to be explored at the front end of our transitions, those edges that offer real potential and many unknowns that we are all undertaking, these observations are providing the “fuel” and will underpin my supportive advisory & mentoring services to a client.
• Seeking out these dynamic environments nurtures an understanding of what is evolving, and what impact and growth opportunities this has for a business to explore and exploit,
• In my view, it is by taking the innovator’s perspective into the assessment of the need of a client’s transition needs.

Positioning the way forward.

• My primary role is advising and coaching within these areas of applying innovation, ecosystem thinking to sustainable thinking. The principal focuses then is to support and build internal capacity, competencies, and capabilities to undertake any transformation journey.
• I break my business out into dedicated focal topics into “big transforming” points of impact, applying understanding and insights that are in my mind complementary, synergistic or clarifying new emerging intersections, for growth potential that has value-adding impact and business model change.
• The combination of innovation within ecosystem thinking and the design approach has arrived, capitalizing on the value points of digitalisation combined with technology and human ingenuity; both in the Industrial IoT world and finding a growing place and pace in the Energy Transition, each is having, in my view, a very different combination effect for value creation and business impact. These are my primary focus points.

My Innovation intent has been central to this period in consulting, mentoring, coaching and advising business entities, start-ups, not-for-profit and government agencies. This intent has progressively ‘funnelled down’ into recognizing the value of ecosystems and the future work-to-be-done as the business design for innovation in the future; to thrive and deliver more significant value creation, especially in the Energy Transition underway.

The repositioning of my understanding has been a journey of comprehension and recognition.

I run a specialized advisor and mentoring business called Agility Innovation; it has an intensity of focus on its clients’ needs and always looking to contribute to a client’s own specific journey but I have often struggled to let go of the past ways of undertaking a business, using tools that are evolving but not as fast as taking a vastly different approach, an adaptive, flexible approach.

It is only recently I was seeing this combining aspect of innovation, ecosystems in thinking and design for sustainability, to shift my focus. I suppose this does have that real advantage of being small, nimble and, yes, agile (in my own way) to provide a new dimension and connected model.

The end result is bringing together many strands of thinking, in a ‘living and dynamic’ newly designed innovation touch and value maps, that need to evolve constantly over time in ecosystem design.

Part of my previous work, in understanding how to make innovation capabilities more dynamic, has taken me towards the end result to generate your new fitness landscapes, that follows ecosystem designs and thinking that are moving towards delivering a more sustaining ability to grow.

Through this fresh journey, I am exploring and exploiting a greater adaptive approach that constantly focuses on building the appropriate capabilities and competencies to undertake different challenges in variable collaborations.

The real value is becoming (more) adaptive in design and capability understanding, that fits your immediate and longer-term needs. Ones that build up a capacity that gives this flexible, versatile and malleable design; an evolving, living ecosystem that constantly adjusts to give a new sustaining future of seeking out in different places growth and future value creation impact.

Over time and experiences, you clarify and deepen your innovation proactive principles, build-out ecosystem thinking and see co-creation as the new value and impact route and make this a constant “living and dynamic” touch and value map.

I do enjoy my journey of discovery, I just wish I had even more time to explore it. My wish is to deploy this thinking in future client work on this connected approach.