Tag Archives: Business Ecosystems

Gearing up for sustainability in business is becoming core

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Sustainability is the new growth core in business change

Sustainability is near the very top or close to the top of any forward-looking board’s agenda. The board is recognizing the growing concerns of several “intertwined issues” that are needing significant recalibrating and is forcing them to think beyond asking “how can we thrive and survive, into how can we build a sustainable pathway for value, growth and impact?”.

Where does our business fit within and alongside society, both in who we serve and society in general, coupled with realising that the planet is heading towards a critical crisis. Today, we need to account for the impacts of heat, flooding, water shortages, health and food issues and what we can do to reduce these pressures? How can each of us make a contribution to becoming more sustainable?

There are growing impact points that are harder to separate, they are increasingly becoming intertwined. The economy for a business to function and be profitable, an environment that is climate and nature friendly and thirdly, the growing considerations for a broader range of people to serve, support or inform the social and corporate values come increasingly together.

We live in a connected world mutually dependent on nature, our environment, in sharing and valuing that we only thrive and survive if we collaborate and cooperate. Continue reading →

The combination effect of ecosystems, platforms, marketplaces and portfolios

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Combination effect of combining ecosystems, platforms, marketplaces and portfolios into the organizations future thinking and design

Today we need a completely different type of thinking for designing our business future, one that is highly collaborative, a design thinking approach, to give the “combination effect” of ecosystems, platforms, marketplaces and portfolios.

We need to recognize the value of taking an Ecosystem thinking and design approach.

For far too long business organizations have been trapped in their own silos of thinking and collaborating, achieving only their one perspective of what a market or their customers need

Often this relied on time-consuming research or focus groups and the outcomes were often flawed as the sample size was too small, the market dynamics were evolving and shifting and research of this nature often lags. Also, often executives operate at a significant distance from the market itself to lose that essential contact.

Equally, to quantify the research you often had to make given assumptions or have more advanced prototypes to show and gauge the reaction and thinking. This tended to take you back into a loop of the redesign adding further conflicting views and opinions.

Today we can’t afford such a layered, sequential, and linear system as the competition has become faster, it comes from any point of the globe and advances at a pace it is hard to track and respond to without a highly adaptive, responsive business model design.

We still talk of fast followers and laggards but this has one dangerous assumption, we all want to be like each other and that, will eventually spin us into the race to the bottom. Continue reading →

Ecosystems and Platforms, the new collaborative business need.

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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: Continue reading →

Building trust in community relationships offers much

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Trust, dialogues and relationships often lead to new breakthrough ideas

There is a realization today, far more than in the past, that greater trust in relationships builds not just from projecting forward aspirations and values, but also in gaining a greater community involvement.

This greater community involvement often leads to new collaborative breakthrough ideas not possible without this open sharing.

For example, if a business addresses its environmental footprint and works to change its social impact in ways to protect our planet it gains clear identification and association.

Trust comes from connecting shared values and providing the narrative of how this journey will be undertaken and asking others to help build this in collaborative engagement and shared platforms. Continue reading →

The Constantly Living Dynamics of Ecosystem Governance Always Needed

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Ecosystems will change the nature of business activities. Here are four of these but they need the beating heart of Governance to be pulsing through them by taking an evolving, living dynamic governance approach.

Ecosystems can lead to four distinct value-adding opportunities

  • Ecosystems will have the potential to expand capabilities and enable experiences beyond anything possible today in the present world that most of our business organizations operate in; ones that are operating in their own ‘disconnected’ world, internally focused, constrained by limited technology connection and resources.
  • Ecosystems open up the world. They connect it for richer access to diversity and different sets of discoveries not possible within one organization’s current capabilities or capacities. It is highly collaborative and interactive.
  • It is by this very nature of opening up and interacting building a growing interdependence in relationships, that is driving the new innovation potential. As one is looking to create and explore new business value by willing collaborators acting together, that offers potential for outcomes to be greater than the sum of the individual parts.
  • As our world becomes more complex, ecosystems offer ways to coalesce around those sorts of growing, seemingly complicated challenges, that bring together within the ecosystem community the potential to build, solve, share and exchange goals and concepts that help solve these complexities,  achieved in highly collaborative ways.

One of the most critical aspects of a thriving ecosystem comes from recognizing that Governance needs to be highly dynamic, constantly evolving as the inner heart of a good Ecosystem.

Distinctive Governance Challenges that keep evolving.
 Continue reading →

The viability of building out sustaining business ecosystems and platforms

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The viability of building sustaining business Ecosystems

Ecosystems and platforms are the present way to build your business or so we are advised. Yet there is ahead of us potentially the evolving way we take the Metaverse, this might be on the future horizon to take ecosystem thinking into a new direction.

Let’s see will metaverses take our present ecosystem thinking beyond? A metaverse is all the connections between the financial, virtual, and physical worlds that are becoming increasingly linked.

In many ways, the metaverse will combine all aspects of life in one place and become far more of our future platforms. There are commonalities between existing language and practice and the metaverse can extend this out.

For instance in reality, virtually, immersive, in marketplace offerings, in building a stronger blockchain element, having a greater social or customer participation. Marketplaces can decentralize even further what we have, we can interact differently, having more options to stimulate or be creative, and we will continue to build out interoperability and accessibility.

All of this is a “promise yet to come” but not so far away not to consider where the Metaverse might take ecosystem and platform practice into our present thinking.

Stepping back from the promise of what might yet come Continue reading →

Business Innovation Ecosystems

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Connected Network or Ecosystem Forming

The growing need to have a deeper understanding of the connections within Ecosystems has taken me into the world of Artificial Intelligence (AI) with the ability to quickly search for connected areas that “make” ecosystems.

So what is the value of AI when you are researching a subject? I have found applying a selected “natural language generation” technique as helpful.  It has accelerated and streamlined my research, making any analysis faster, it has been sometimes fairly puzzling in some of the outputs but I feel you are gaining from “real-time” data and keyword associations that provide new insights. The end results will certainly help shape my thinking into the future of Ecosystem Management. Continue reading →

Accelerating Innovation comes from Ecosystem thinking

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Just a reflective moment I am sharing here on the place of Ecosystem thinking.  We need to recognize the changes we need to undertake, even in a world of infinite possibilities. We chose to explore new ways of working; new solutions to difficult challenges need a new approach to accelerating innovation through ecosystem thinking.

In my view:

“Today and in the future, to take where we are in our technology and digital understanding and feed it greater human ingenuity, we give it intelligence, real new intelligence not just the artificial stuff. When we combine the collected knowledge found in a network of collaborators, we can dramatically advance the solutions sought by unlocking previously intractable problems.”

The new environment offers us infinite possibilities
 Continue reading →

Thinking differently about Ecosystems

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Thinking about ecosystems certainly allows us to go out of our normal scope of the possible invention by allowing us to push innovation and be creative to accelerate and extend our thinking well beyond just knowing as one, we connect to many and all the diversity of knowledge and understanding this can offer.

The ability to tackle those larger societal problems within an ecosystem, or combine unique resources to overcome a complex business challenge you are incapable of solving alone, does have greater potential in a collaborative adaptive system. Collaborating is the route to greater value and enhancing a shared objective, extending the scope and scale beyond just your borders or offering.

Ecosystem co-operations can allow you to align with others, totally outside your existing relationships, so you can enter new markets, explore new concepts and design, that would have been impossible as an individual organization.

Applying ecosystem thinking offers you the collaborative ability to extend beyond more traditional delivery channels, or being restricted to only utilizing your own existing infrastructure. It allows you to search and build on others that can add their specialization to build out that “greater” concept. Continue reading →

The future of managing will be through ecosystems and platforms

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I am constantly drawn to ecosystems and platforms as the connecting mechanism that can drive the need for greater collaboration, sharing, and exchanging, and for this, we need to learn a new form of ’emerging’ management practice

Collaborating in collective ways helps break down complexity. To be ready to respond we must be ready to seek out unexpected outcomes, to be increasingly exposed to new opinions, experiences, and to learn from all those adjacencies and external connections, so as to help us add and define new potential within our domain of expertise.

In our past management practices, we have operated and exploited the linear world for ever-increasing efficiencies and effectiveness. This relied on stability, predictability, and a willing end-user, ready to accept ‘our’ offer of product or service. All three of these conditions are increasingly absent from our world today and will increasingly be challenged in the future.

Our increasing connectivity, brought about by our digital world is giving us increasing volume, richness at increasing speed. We are in a hyper-connected world, potentially global for all of us and increasingly we will operate in interdependent ecosystems that allow us to collaborate and share, driving up awareness and performance.

What will be rewarded in this connecting world is the agility to respond, the ability to absorb and learn quickly, and the nimbleness to translate and adapt new learning into insights and eventual outcomes, that build out our businesses, keeping them healthy, growing, and sustainable.

Classic models of management get broken down in any ecosystem approach, that is why I believe we must search for ways to adapt to this new world of ecosystem and platform collaboration.

It requires some very different management thinking, let me offer some thoughts:

Our world is shifting from scalable efficiency to scalable learning Continue reading →