Your Ecosystem Design Hub

Innovation Platforms: the future way to go.

July 5, 2021December 22, 2016 by @paul4innovating

platform-building We need to shift our innovation thinking, it needs to be digitally transformed. We need to accelerate our activity and engagement and to achieve this, we need to widen out our communities and connect differently.

This is where platforms come in, “they offer new business models that allow multiple sides (producers and consumers) to interact…..by providing an infrastructure that connects them” (source: Platformed.Info by Sangeet Paul Choudary)

The more I read, discuss and research platforms, the clearer the future becomes for innovation to really advance and achieve its potential, one so often spoken about yet so disappointing in most of its results to date. Innovation calls for the need of a radical change. Technology and its growing potential can make the changes to dramatically alter this.

Actually, technology is transforming the very nature of the firm.

Why experimenting with platform innovation is vital

May 8, 2022December 19, 2016 by @paul4innovating

Why wait?

Paul Hobcraft and I have been writing extensively about the impact that emerging platforms and ecosystems are having, and will have, on innovation.

As I wrote previously, we are in the same position with platforms that we were with “dot coms” and ecommerce in 1999. Then there were thousands of alternatives and experiments to try to figure out what would work. Now, much the same thing is going to happen at the platform level.

There’s a reason Amazon, Facebook, Google, GE and others are trying to test out their platforms, and why other industries like financial services want so desperately for their own platforms to prevail.

Platforms are enticing because they lead to the concept of a required standard. Anyone who controls a platform in an industry or market can dictate how the rest of the ecosystem adds value or in some cases connects to customers.

Thus, we can expect to see a lot of companies claiming to have the definitive platform in this or that industry. What’s more, some functions, like the ability to pay for goods and services within a platform, are already platforms in themselves, although they are narrow but important enablers to larger platforms.

Some companies and their platforms will thrive, some companies will build enabling technologies or the “APIs” that ensure tight integration for ecosystem players, but most will take a “wait and see” approach.

Managing digital knowledge adds value and growth through forming connections

July 5, 2021December 13, 2016 by @paul4innovating

fitting-it-all-together Digital technology is about to become the precursor for all the changes we have put off for years within our organizations.

We need to radically improve our abilities to engage, relate and discover new innovation opportunities at a completely different level of faster and more meaningful performance.

It is through new forms of collaborations that will allow us to connect, by combining the concepts of ecosystems, platforms and seamless customer experience through digital technology, that is allowing this to happen.

Technology is presently moving way ahead of the systems that our organizations have presently in place, many are failing to extract the value and insights that others are beginning to clearly see and capitalize on, through the connection of technologies and market insights.Many lack the ability to connect and gain valuable insights.

Nurturing the Network Effect of Firms within Innovation Ecosystems.

May 8, 2022December 6, 2016 by @paul4innovating

nurturing-the-ecosystem — The Network Effect for Ecosystem Designs

We are forming in many different ways our greater collection of relationships that matter to each organization, by connecting increasingly in a network of potential partners and collaborators.

The goals are so as to deliver innovative products and services that would not be able to be delivered by only having just the one organization attempting it.

Managing this growing form of innovation complexity is challenging old theories, boundaries, organizations and how they exist going forward.

Ecosystem innovation is more today about managing beyond the immediate known’s found within one organization’s limited focus of the world, they are exploring many of the unknowns that need discovery and then connection.

Are you ready to thrive in a world of Innovation Ecosystems?

May 8, 2022December 6, 2016 by @paul4innovating

thriving-in-an-ecosystem-design-2 — opening up to the world of ecosystem thinking

We are in need of a profound shift in the Business landscape. Our growth remains constrained by not just the economic conditions we find ourselves in but also because we are failing to make innovation central to change. It remains for most the incremental pathway to steady performance and safe returns.

Yet the world continues to be volatile, the consumer increasingly disgruntled and our political world continues to be turned upside down. Business needs to move from being part of the problem, into pioneering and leading the solutions for growth. Surprisingly it does have the potential for a winning design ‘to hand’ – by managing within innovation ecosystems.

What makes up a winning innovation ecosystem of design?

Moving towards a new connecting innovation model

July 5, 2021December 1, 2016 by @paul4innovating

We are facing tough challenges within the business world. To work through these we are all being asked to transform but there has to be a clear end, a return for all this energy and resources it requires, that we are being asked to spend?

How and where does innovation fit 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 .

We have three choices: we need to transform, be disrupted or certainly re-imagine and this is where knowing your ecosystem comes in.

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 has to be part of a greater collaborating network to thrive in this highly connected world.

Today larger organizations are having to face the stark truth, they are losing out, in growth and opportunities.

Either they adapt or die. Technology offers them the transforming means but can they, as leaders, take their people with them? It needs bold leadership. The structure of our business today cannot afford to try and stand alone, it needs to extend beyond its traditional supporting partners, it needs to learn to collaborate with a whole new range of partners, even some previously competitors, to radically adapt to the different world we live in.

Innovating like it’s 1999

May 8, 2022November 28, 2016 by @paul4innovating

1999-party To borrow a phrase from the musician formerly known as Prince, we are innovating, at least in regards to platforms and ecosystems, like it’s 1999. This isn’t to suggest innovation is making beautiful music, but to take you back to a specific point in time and think about the conditions.

In the late, late 1990s and very early 2000s, many individuals and corporations were experimenting with ecommerce, learning what the “web” would do to and for commerce.

Thousands of startups obtained billions of dollars in venture capital money to exploit the new idea of e-commerce. We were assured that this would be the end of brick and mortar stores. Every industry would be disrupted by the web. Pet owners would go to Pets.com, famous for its sock puppet mascots. The CEO of Accenture would leave his post to become CEO of Webvan, which would revolutionize grocery shopping and delivery. And so on.

Mostly what happened in that period was a vast blooming of a number of experiments on the web, which led to the “dot com” crash only a few years later and drove many of these startups and some larger, established companies out of business. Most of these crashes happened because no one had figured out how all of this new ecommerce stuff was supposed to work, or because of vague promises of the ability to monetize eyeballs.

New technologies or capabilities will always create a “land rush” of companies, new and established, who seek to stake their claims.

The Building Blocks for Managing within an Ecosystem Design

May 8, 2022November 24, 2016 by @paul4innovating

building-blocks-for-ecosystems-2 Today business organizations are in need to put in place the building blocks for managing ecosystem designs.

These building blocks are offering the potential of new pathways to a greater ‘connected’ innovation, expected today, one that gives increased value to the consumer.

Yet the understanding of what this means in commitment and structuring has some clear implications behind this.

Managing ecosystem arrangements I feel requires a far greater understanding of the potential design, so you can achieve a more robust, open, dynamic and highly collaborative environment.

Understanding the Customer Journey is the key to innovating in an ecosystem

July 5, 2021November 16, 2016 by @paul4innovating

evolving-innovation-a-new-form Paul and I have been exploring the interrelationships between innovation, ecosystems and platforms for a few weeks now.

Hopefully we’ve made the point that innovators must expand their horizons, because increasingly customers don’t want or need stand alone, discrete products as much as they want integrated, seamless, holistic solutions.

In fact I think we can easily predict that moderately interesting new innovations that integrate with existing ecosystems and platforms dominate disruptive new products that ignore ecosystems and platforms.

Why? Customers don’t want to give up all that they have invested in the totality of their use of a solution or the experience when using the solution. Even if the disruptive product or service delivers outsized benefits, if it causes the rest of the customers’ experience to suffer or degrade, many will choose to remain on a more integrated solution.

There’s a lot here to unpack.

The Dynamism in Chinese Ecosystems and Platforms

July 5, 2021November 13, 2016 by @paul4innovating

chinese-tigers-3

Today we have to “think China” when it comes to looking for the dynamism within Ecosystems and Platforms, they are leading, exploring and extending the thinking beyond our more limited ambitions in the West.

It is the environmental conditions coming together or being explored and exploited that make China stand out in its dynamism in this area.

It is that combination effect of the Government building, laying in ‘accepted’ guidelines and encouraging the infrastructure, it is the business entrepreneur and the social conditions that are enabling so much.

Dynamism is the quality of being characterized by vigorous activity and progress. It projects an energy, force, power and vigor and a strong desire to make something happen. It is the manifestation of these forces (conditions) that is constantly pushing the boundaries of our understanding of what is possible in the ecosystem and platform approach. The Chinese have found ways to experiment, develop and constantly create a real motion within the system.