The lag has been connecting industry up, to the transforming value of ecosystems, to collaborate and build new value on co-developed platforms. There are some leading voices on this, determined to be the orchestrators- exploiting first mover advantage- who are heavily investing in the software and analytics to demonstrate value for not just themselves but drawing in lead customers to offer real, added ‘connected’ value.

I am watching three specifically in the digital industrial space of GE, Bosch and more recently Siemens as they build their ecosystems and offer their platforms as solutions into Industry.

These are among the growing voices on different aspects of innovation, connecting machines, data and new human understanding, of adding the new value or focusing on even more on the preventative aspects where industrial assets need to be constantly performing, as essential. For instance in aviation, power, energy, transport, and healthcare. They are at the forefront of reshaping entire industry dynamics.

As we look to build more through ecosystems and upon collaborative platforms, the more we are changing the dynamics of the industry, moving increasingly away from the traditional manufacturing and service industries, rather structured on each having their own specific design and offering. By opening up and collaborating you have the potential to build more complex solutions, share in risk and costs and deliver far more connected experience that customers value

Part of my shifting my own innovation advisory work was to build a greater understanding of the power of ecosystems and collaboration. This site here https://ecosystems4innovating.wordpress.com/about/   explains why there is this dedicated approach and why I chose to shift part of my business over to developing a “certain” knowledge expertise on ecosystems and platforms last year.

There are so many changes occurring in collaborations it needed a dedicated focus from my perspective. This is a part of the reason this posting site sets about explaining this evolving phenomenon. Business Ecosystems has become a powerful catalyst for innovation in really different, far more radical ways, connecting more through unique ecosystem design and dedicated platform collaborations.

There is a really big shift occurring in innovation as the graph below shows.

When you start thinking about the ten types of innovation and where those can be channeled onto platforms, in highly collaborative ways to cover off multiple types of innovation through platforms and ecosystem collaborations to meet customer needs.

Source: https://www.slideshare.net/lugtu/types-of-innovation-59505692

The race to become a key orchestrator

This visual provides a clear understanding of the position of the orchestrator. They become a prime influencer and provider

One catalyst within Industry has been GE Predix

At present we are at the beginning of a very current, emerging story that might shift GE’s Predix and its recent strategy. GE have dug themselves int a very deep hole, the CEO & Chairman’s position has just changed hands. Recently GE had made investments of $4 billion transforming GE into a digital industrial company, with $1 billion invested in the Predix platform alone. This has been to shift GE and its business model to be a premier digital industrial company and what is critical to this is its Predix Platform, a critical operating system for the Industrial Internet, by connecting industrial equipment, analysing data, and delivering real-time insights, Predix-based apps are unleashing new levels of performance of both GE and non-GE assets through designing and responding to different customer, market, and conditions that the machinery operates in.

The strategic ambition of the past CEO/ Chairman Jeff Immelt was to be “leading in a digital industrial era”. The embracing of the digital industrial transformation will clearly continue under the new leadership but be moderated and become a more focused strategy. It is clear that digital helps deliver customer outcomes and adds value but the new focus will be more on GE’s specific business verticals where the win rate is higher applying Predix-driven applications. So this signals a shift that GE Digital will support GE’s mix of businesses strategy in the near term to drive their revenue but will be less industry shaping in the foreseeable future.

No, GE Predix-for-the-world seems to be the vision of the past, today and GE’s harsh realities confronting it, means more a GE for GE and it’s customers to drive growth and bring in part of the essential cash they are starved of. This move takes some of the momenta out of the digital industrial movement but GE will be focusing exceptionally on asset-heavy industries bringing digital capabilities to the mix but for its own customer base, less open to the world in general.

Adjusting to GE’s ‘reset’ and recognizing other Companies looking to Orchestrate digital platforms

As we absorb the GE “reset mode” across the whole company others will take up the slack. The strongest orchestrator for me has been Bosch in recent times. They serve multiple industries but are heavily focused on bringing Îndustry 4.0 to life and been working on a range of practical solutions.

Bosch- “We are experts for the Internet of Things”

I am following them with growing interest, as Bosch, the main supplier into the smart era of mobility, cities, and homes and through their subsidiary Bosch Software Innovation, are building a technology stack of IoT that is becoming, for now, a go-to place for the industry. In my review “Bosch Software Innovations will drive your connected device business” you get a real sense of this. In an earlier post “Bosch: A Leading Platform Exemplar of Digitally Connecting” I outline some of the necessary details and put much into context, to understand why Bosch is becoming well positioned to connect ‘everything with everything.’ They are mainly developing this to align with the new manufacturing era which has been dubbed the Industry 4.0 and the need to build multiple ecosystems. Bosch is offering the different analytic applications needed, the device management tools and the platform enablement for rapid deployment and device development that becomes designed to your specifications and needs on their platform, validated mostly by their own implementation and application.

The third company I am equally beginning to really appreciate is Siemens.

They are building a connecting platforms for many similar reasons as GE. To connect the customer and his machines with a greater human understanding. I’ll let two great visuals offered by Siemens to describe their positioning

Also, this offers the way they are exploring digital, building on their software, platform-as-a-service and connecting into their ecosystem in specific digital industrial era ways.

Lastly here, I want to touch on Asia as powerful catalysts leading the change.

Chinese companies are extending platform management and thinking in some very evolutionary ways. My main focus was on one special company so far, Alibaba, which is going more and more head to head with Amazon, if not the premier platform provider, certainly it is up there. In the post, I wrote: “Where the physical and virtual worlds are blurring, thanks to Alibaba” you gain a sense of how transforming this is becoming. They are so focused on building the fundamental infrastructure for modern commerce, presently comprising marketplaces, payment, logistics, cloud computing and big data that it’s ‘collectively’ empowering businesses of all sizes to leverage the internet for their own digital transformation.

In Summary. The world of platforms are transforming where and how we are undertaking business, they allow us to build and connect our brands, products and services alongside others and offer far more complex solutions to draw in the customer and achieve a closer customer experience need.

** this was part of a post I provided and was published on the Hype Innovation Blog recently but updated due to recent developments and changes within the platform domain in recent months

The post Industry is lagging but catching up in its choices of platform offerings first appeared on Your Ecosystem Design Hub.

There is, or should be, a recognition that all businesses should find opportunities to coalesce into networked ecosystems. They need to open up to a far greater potential than is presently on offer to each individual entity, unless you have deep pockets (Apple), as well as so many app developers lining up to be part of their ecosystem, or patient shareholders (Amazon) continuing seeing growth but limited profit return, or inflows of revenue (Google), where you can invest in new, potentially huge but speculative, technology-related business concepts.

Ecosystems can offer so much connecting value out there to ‘form’ around.

We are witnessing a very radical change, driven by technology, increasingly disrupting and breaking down past traditional boundaries, partly built to defend positions so as to achieve economic scale. There is a new economic logic to build even greater scale, it involves greater complexity, yet its value proposition is to strive towards offer greater customer experience and satisfaction, where the solutions are valued highly in social and economic value. Ones that get closer to their connected expectations and daily needs for solutions to solve, in far better ways, than that are presently offered. Innovative design has become paramount to these new offerings.

The market dynamics are also changing. Those businesses with a different mindset of global trade and value proposition building will benefit. Risk is taking on different forms to capitalize on these changes. Today we can all be liberated through the exploitation of technology and new radical innovation design. In some ways, it has become a new ‘land grab’ panning for digital gold. We are at the point of building a new frontier that is calling for business change.

As we think through the impacts of the changes we need to reflect on some of its parts. Some of these are outlined here:

We are at a stage where regulators are scrambling to redefine policies, resolve the issues around different tax regimes, as they struggle to understand how the public should be protected or be made aware of all the changes taking place. The pace of change is creating significant regulatory lag as technology change is happening at a relentless pace. As opportunities emerge new forces are exploiting global trading. They are leveraging our shared private and public information and are busy exploiting the significant differences in dealing across national borders. Technology moving seamlessly across previously defined national borders requires a new world order. For business this is a time for building, not defending if you are looking to grow but it needs investment and managing risk in different ways than the past.

Technology has been the catalyst for this transformation of the business landscape.

Ecosystems have suddenly become of age, as they can be formed rapidly, they can enable cross-cutting innovation to be delivered in highly collaborative ways. They can, through shared platforms achieve closer relationship with the customer, to understand their needs and experience through increased collaboration, and engagement.

Everything has suddenly become more dynamic and this has enabled the pace of innovation to speed up for exploiting breaking opportunities. Technology has enabled business to scale up quickly, partly due to risk-sharing in technology exploitation and partly in these exploratory forms of partnerships. Collaborative insights have enabled businesses to explore spaces that were previously unable to be unlocked, without this greater collaboration and diversity in (solution) competencies. The business landscape has opened up, providing the potential to explore very different value opportunities.

Ecosystems can allow a business to evolve beyond its own (self-imposed) boundaries.

Supply chains are shifting into value webs jumping from products into services, that when combine with other like-minded collaborators and partners can offer radically different customer propositions. The concept of spanning and connecting through platforms enables collaborators to mutually design and share their ability, to build potentially superior services than in the past, ones that draw in the customer and lift the relationship and their buying experiences.These are reshaping business strategies if the value can be seized upon and exploited.

Assets are increasingly being moved from owning to sharing.

Open innovation has taken us into a more collaborative, connected world. As the ecosystem of partners builds its mutual trust and supporting system, it allows for a more open flow of assets, knowledge and intellectual property to flow throughout the connected ecosystem design. Businesses, through collaborations, are more open, agile and fluid. It is this fluid movement that is increasing rate of exchanges that are occurring between parties, requiring far more highly responsive reactions. This openness of exchange is challenging existing organizations greatly on how to open up their own island of expertise and offering, while protecting or building out their intellectual property.

Connecting and collaborating opportunities for business seem to be really powerful networks of value-adding effect, for finding new economic opportunity. This calls for some radical rethinking of the existing business and deciding the design of the future business.  This  calls  for thinking through a different designed structure for the business and different skills needed. The shifting from the current state to the future designed state is no easy task. It requires a radical redesign of the organization, as it significantly increases complexity and where any digital transformation has to center upon as the critical enabler to enable this shift.

The lag to all these changes occurring in the business world is determining the winners and losers.

It is identifying the critical capabilities and being adept and agile enough in learning from these, to embed them into the changing culture. There is a critical need to be technology savvy, digitally adroit, highly analytical and fast to make the connections, to explore and exploit the ‘breaking’ opportunities. We are having to adjust our learning to have increased levels of higher human-centered approaches, through exploiting design thinking, to learn and adapt. Design thinking can provide a different thinking-through perspective to manage in more complex environments, break down barriers and overcome new hurdles to deliver new economic value. New economic value has to be ‘seen’ and believed in so people can engage and work towards making their change.

We are exploring new ways to think to extend the business ecosystem design

We are attempting to integrate in new ways the increasing needs and capacities of people, to capitalize on a myriad of choices with technology options and find new ways for business success. The approach needs to work around that of being viable, desirable and feasible, as the new value combination for new innovation, that design thinking contributes into. We are actually forging far more ‘upstream’ and trying to reverse the ‘downstream’ many of today’s business find themselves in, to regain real value propositions that can offer a more sustainable business future. We are searching for a new design thinking framing to contribute, see here and here on this and my recently released report discussing this.

We are learning to integrate ‘lean’ and agile’ far more into our approaches.

This is not just in writing code but in the whole way we set ourselves up to operate. As complexity rises we have to liberate resources from the regular, more mundane tasks and re-skill them for the new, more sophisticated designs that collaboration through ecosystems and platforms demands. We are attempting to build a new ‘playbook’ of managing within these business ecosystems. Everything has to be faster, adaptable and flexible, with early testing, validation, and proof of concept. We are building new business models designed for collaboration but clear enough in our economic value and position to want to compete and invest.

Ecosystem design will create new business opportunities. We need to make the business case

We are faced with a number of principal drivers of change, that I believe we need to consider for deciding upon in any decision to actively participate in business ecosystems. These are:

1. The constant exponential of technology and its power to change is forcing up to change.
2. The need to search and create new business models needs to be explored differently
3. The shift in value chain building (e.g products to connected services) needs greater connections
4. Moving from the present core into new industrial areas and geographical reach is becoming essential to navigating.
5. The need to scale and increasingly be seen as globe or very local (glocal) is a pressure point not to be ignored
6. The increasing need for collaborating and extracting external expertise contains increasing cost and investment.
7. Demands by customers are shifting to expecting customer experience and engagement that we must provide
8. The need to channel your resources into more productive value-added activities is essential as ‘good’ resources are growing in scarcity.

The need for radical innovation changes the present position

We need to become more ready to deal with the unknowns. We need to find the capacities to experiment and explore far more, building the diversity into our thinking that partners and collaborators can bring. We need to increase the risk appetite through better risk assessments, a deeper appreciation of where ecosystems and networks can significantly contribute and search constantly for new revenue and market building opportunities.

What we need to do is change our present constraints.

We have built-in constraints. They are holding us back. Boards and Senior Management have a lack of time, as they are often too busy, focusing on the day-to-day. They remain extremely nervous when they do not have clear lines of insight to make what they see as riskier decisions. Finally, they are struggling with their present organizational design to adjust and adapt to the changing external world, full of uncertainties. To dither, to put decisions off, to seek out more certainty is not a position of any strength, it is the catalyst to eventual destruction. We need to face these inbuilt constraints.

There is growing value in engaging in business ecosystems

The potential impact of engagement has a range of benefits that need exploring and answering:

1. Ecosystem configurations enable the (one) business to offer more value to customers
2. They attract, more often than not, new customer bases to go on top of the traditional base
3. Ecosystem designs enable the business to create entirely new and different business opportunities
4. The growth potential can improve being part of a “network effect” due to new propositions
5. Structuring organizational design to leverage the value of collaborations gives greater flexibility
6. Contributing your part to a bigger ecosystem design allows a depth of focus on the activities you do well
7. You gain the ability to share market risks within a partnership of collaborators, committed to a shared vision and pursue new business opportunities that you could not afford on your own.
8. You grow your capabilities as you co-evolve, align future investments and find mutually reinforcing and supportive roles to exploit opportunities.
9. Ecosystems force you to become more proactive to thrive and perform, to master greater sophistication and complexity.
10. The potential impact with customers valuing these connected experiences and being able to participate, engage and contribute opens up value-adding potential

Summary

The value of breaking down long-standing boundaries is occurring with or without you. Barriers are dissolving as more recognize the need and value of coalescing around a networked ecosystem. The chances for greater, more radical innovation to grow the business comes from exploring mutual opportunities to capture new economic value.

As you open yourself up to collaborating you open yourself up for greater learning and from this you can reshape your business design to adjust to this changing reality we are finding within a business; the need for designing our business into business ecosystems, to offer greater growth.

The post Rethinking the Value of Business Ecosystems first appeared on Your Ecosystem Design Hub.

Credit Katri Valkokari

I wrote a post “the Interconnected Parts of the Ecosystem” earlier this year, after a paper written by Katri Valkokari, a Research Manager at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland caught my eye. I wanted to come back to this really powerful visual, recognizing the three interrelated ecosystems we require to form around. I mentioned in my post, these three parts actually do fuse into one, making up an integrated ecosystem of their distinct parts.

It gave me a level of recognition that we do have this need for this three-stage evolution, especially in a business context. Each establishes a boundary of scope and feeds into each other constantly. It is the fact they combine ideas, skills, learning, fresh insights, leading to promising outcomes and creations. It is how they interact and add new value that gives this ‘combination effect’ such potential for us to consider.

The combining of tangible and intangible assets gives us ‘fresh capital’. I have written about Capital and consciously focused upon this, up to know, more under Innovation Capital, as this draws in knowledge through insights and then pushes these out from Knowledge into Organizations as concepts to be explored and exploited, to grow and improve.

Our innovation capital has mostly been internally built to date, yet there is a time and need to take this out with new forms of collaboration, leveraging all the combined assets into a new “collective capital”. This needs reflecting upon, of how you would ‘break this down’, perhaps within this awareness of all these three ecosystems that we do need to consider.

Have you asked why are business ecosystems emerging as a real competitive force?

As we begin to open up our thinking and begin to focus on the concept of ecosystems, it will increasingly have a powerful effect on our future growth perspectives in considering alternatives and possibilities. The network of different partners will all contribute to this often ‘emergent’ thinking and will very quickly increase the total sum of the value, the ‘combination effect’ will bring to the ‘party’. Diversity in innovation is a powerful catalyst.

The single industry and business-specific approach are seeing change, many companies are exploring the value of becoming involved in a business ecosystem that crosses a variety of industries to build new communities that have the capacity to transform existing environments.

Linking the three interdependent ecosystems

To plug into achieving this ‘paradigm shift’ that Business is required to manage, to transform themselves, the search is on for forming the ecosystem or set of ecosystems that can deliver on this ‘transformation’ going on in front of our eyes that works for us. We can’t afford to wait, we must experiment, explore and extract different learnings from our own involvement. Standing back never wins the race, it only relegates you to being a bystander and to achieve any successful innovation outcome demands engagement and involvement.

As you build your awareness of the ecosystems that are connecting up your business and its capabilities, there is this real need for new knowledge, for exploiting and exploring innovation concepts, mixed in with the growing need for greater “real-time” customer’s engagement. It is this recognizition of the value of others, within the (ecosystem) design chain, those other stakeholders who are the experts in different parts of the connected need of customers, who link up to deliver better value than any one single part.

Ecosystems are far 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 connecting these all up into a greater “whole”.

Innovation Capital is absolutely  important to build and leverage

There was a McKinsey report called “Innovation matters: Reviving the growth engine” where they break down Innovation Capital into three components drawn from a study they undertook in selected developed countries. The breakdown of the capital being:

Physical Capital represents 16 percent of the Innovation Capital.

Knowledge Capital represents 60 percent of Innovation Capital across the countries McKinsey analyzed.

Human Capital represents 24 percent of Innovation Capital.

I wrote in a post on this McKinsey report called ” Place Your Future Bets – Invest In Innovation Capital” that it was the pivotal role of people as innovation carriers – their networks, collaborations, knowledge flows, interactions and tacit knowledge – and how innovation itself is a potent competitive force, that drives productivity. All this is often ‘hidden in plain sight’ as our people are innovation’s active ingredient, the catalyst that turns novelty into real benefits, they ‘form’ our thriving ecosystems.

In the future, we need to build new capital based on different thinking: ecosystem thinking.

It is finding uniqueness that becomes increasingly important and comes from new knowledge, innovation investigation, validation, and outcomes and delivered in business ecosystems that offer new customer value, it builds greater value into capital. It is the amount of capital you invest that drives the potential and today, we are increasingly finding that Ecosystems and Platforms, formed around ideas that are often too complex to be developed by a single entity, are benefiting through collaborative endeavors.

They require interactions and interdependencies so as to find ways to tackle more complex, challenging problems and it is this “reacting” taking place between knowledge, innovation, and business on a common platform that gives a certain “synthesis” and greatly extended capital. One feeds into the other and has a greater reinforcing value loop by seeing this exchange between knowledge, innovation, and business, as ongoing learning to search for better and new value.

Absorptive capacity raises it’s head here.

In one post I wrote: “Learning to absorb new knowledge for innovation” on my paul4innovating posting site I outlined the absorptive capacity components

The absorptive ability needs to be developed to use external knowledge and has three sequential processes.

These fit the three parts of ecosystems and connect

A)     Exploratory Learning– recognizing and understanding the potential value of the new knowledge that lies outside the organization (think Knowledge Ecosystems)

B)    Transformative learning– dispersing and assimilating the valuable new knowledge ( think Innovation Ecosystems)

C)    Exploitative learning– using the assimilated knowledge to create something different in knowledge or product and seek to explore and exploit this in commercial ways.(think Business Ecosystems)

The call for managing the effective use of knowledge in ecosystem constructs

One of the central drivers of the competitiveness of all organizations is their effective use of knowledge. It is the generation, acquisition, integration and application of (new) knowledge needs that managers are able to manage learning. Knowledge underpins innovation, it informs it, the more it has change as part of its makeup, the more it becomes complex to discover, the more we have of this real need to upgrade how we experience, experiment and absorb learning and this is increasingly outside our own organizations.

The combination of ecosystem thinking and the use of platforms offers the potential result of integration and connection across different fields of expertise and knowledge domains. It allows for a greater use of a diverse pool of sharper minds, available only in this broader network, offering independent as well as collective wisdom and thinking.

We need to form knowledge ecosystems and these needs structuring. As we absorb more external knowledge from our collaborators the need is to organise this well. Absorptive capacity needs to go beyond good theories into increased application. Absorptive capacity is an integral part of an organizations capabilities and competencies to work upon, for its healthy development. Knowledge is a real significant dimension of innovation management and what constantly is feeding it. Treating knowledge as an ecosystem needs to be certainly considered well in any broader ecosystem design.

The Innovation Ecosystem and why Business Ecosystems need them

The significant transformation taking place around exploiting technology and digital management has made ecosystems and platforms a mainstream prospecting need, in most of our businesses today. We must engage in what all of this means and its business impact.

I certainly believe the ecosystem approach will increasingly become the main value-producing stream for innovation delivery. Platforms, strategic partnerships, new business models all will be on the agenda of any serious global organization and ecosystems through platforms are the organizing environment to enact these.

The delivering of totally different value propositions for the ultimate consumer is a highly daunting challenge. It ‘upends’ much, if not all, of how our business organizations have been organized around, mostly within themselves, it is going to need radical change, the organizations is needing inverting. It calls for bold management to instigate such a transformation and open up to external collaboration and exchanges.

The search is seemingly on for finding greater value and that will increasingly coalesce around innovation ecosystems. We are in need to ‘form’ in many different ways, significantly build more relationships that increasingly matter to each organization, ones that add value, insight and bring external expertise inside, to work on ‘greater’ innovation solutions. We are creating the potential to deliver innovative products and services that extend beyond the stand-alone discreet offering, that would be delivered by only having the one organization attempting it into broader collaborative offerings that provide a greater customer experience. Complexity is on the rise, offering discrete products is on the wane. Value is in the connecting of experience.

I would suggest opening up our thinking towards ecosystems has a powerful effect

As we begin to open up our thinking to ecosystems these are having a powerful effect on our perspectives for future growth through greater collaborative potential, as different partners contribute to this often ‘emergent’ thinking. This becomes more evolutionary and requires a completely different way to manage these ‘relationship contract’s that are forming around a given concept or platform. They require increased interactions within the community and need far more tightly controlled activities to gain the synergies and effects from working within an ecosystem.  Relationship management needs to keep focusing on enhancing and searching for new knowledge, driving innovation in new open collaborative forms and knowing how to adapt this into the whole concept that delivers business value that appeals and differs itself for customer value. No easy task.

To manage ecosystems is hard, it is a constantly adaptive system and requires dedicated focus and ongoing attention to just keep it dynamic, it needs constant engagement and moving along, it needs nurturing.

Ecosystem design helps us move forward in purposeful ways.

The world seems to be evolving far more rapidly than we can cope with. We have this constant need to catch up. To become more effective we must break out of our ‘islands of knowledge’ and find ways to effectively work together, to pool resources in knowledge, innovation and business. Thinking in more ‘ecosystem ways’ offers that potential. We can build, evolve and catalyze better in collaborative designs. We can find better ways to find new insights, create scale and service markets differently. We can push our boundaries into ones that look for more collaborative ways to construct a business that provides a more radical value proposition.

The value of opening up our thinking to an ecosystem design is in what resources get attracted in this venture. We can pull in resources of all sorts, we can draw in different types of capital (tangible and intangible), we can tap increasingly into a wider pool of specialized capabilities, attract different partners, suppliers, and customers to participate with us.

We can build out this cooperative set of networks as it becomes increasingly richer in the network of collaborators you can engage with. As you co-evolve you can develop the ongoing abilities to constantly reconfigure the assets to build the relationship needs and network effects.

In Summary

Ecosystem thinking can have a very transforming effect. It opens us up to a highly fluid, changing world of possibilities. It can help allow you to match and possibly get ahead of all the volatility swirling around us. We can develop strategies built on emerging knowledge and innovations, that can grow out from a collaborating community.

The traditional confines of market boundaries are clearly breaking down and reforming around these ecosystems and platforms that connect partners and consumers in dramatically different, Value-added ways, and that ‘intent’ is driving a radically different environment to manage within, one of building knowledge ecosystems, innovation ecosystems and business ecosystems that connect up and form the interconnected parts of the required ecosystem design.

I believe ecosystems are the new organism of the business world. We need to explore these increasingly in their design and management potential and for me, it is through all three of these ecosystems that we build collective capital than is far greater then the individual parts.

The three ecosystems of knowledge, innovation and business mutually reinforce each other, it is all their interacting parts, their interdependence to each other and how one part fits and reacts with the others, gives this great power.

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The post Returning to the Interconnected Parts of the Ecosystem first appeared on Your Ecosystem Design Hub.

So much focus has been on the disruptive forces at work, the ones that change the present market conditions and rapidly alter the way organizations are “seeing the world” and responding.

The forces also include the pace and competitive nature as organizations globalizing and getting increasingly vulnerable to ‘attack’ due to their size and reaction constraints, locked into their established positions. The bigger the organization, the tougher to be nimble, adaptive and responsive.

There are many well-established organizations suffering the ‘death of a thousand cuts (read start-ups) all intent on taking business away, offering up more ‘viable and attractive’ propositions that meet specific needs of a customer base, one that is increasingly fed up with the ‘one size fit all’ approach. The attraction of new low-cost, good enough products, that do the job that they simply need doing without all the ‘added on’ is stripping away parts of the premium offer built into the past business model of large global organizations.

Organizations are seemingly caught between sustaining their existing business models and approaches to market and those waking up increasingly to finding a different, more radical one as they sense real threat. Technology is driving the need to change. The pressure of ‘connectedness’ and the whole ‘network effect’ are forcing rapid rethinks of how to combat these different pressures.

As organizations grapple with everything being increasingly open in source software, in creative commons, in collaborations they need to find ways to combat the threats. The ones that turn even further into becoming highly defensive, closed in, applying the fortress mentality seem to be doomed. It is working through how to open up, how to collaborate more openly, how to share and how to engage.

The emergence of a new organizational design: highly connected and collaborative

Today the emergence of platforms and ecosystem thinking is offering a significant way to offset many of the forces of current destruction. So taking a thirty thousand view of the changes causing fundamental change was nicely summarized in a report, a specific report for the Oil & Gas Industry, written by the Kellogg Innovation Network (KIN) and Clareo called “The Oil & Gas Industry’s New Normal: Rethinking Innovation Priorities in the Age of Low Prices”

In the report, they were suggesting five issues have emerged across the industry and in thinking about these I felt these can apply to all industries in some shape or form. Let me share these here as these do underscore how whole industries are being reshaped by these forces at work. They apply to all:

1. Market forces are fundamentally reshaping the industry

As discussed in my opening views above, there are multiple forces at work here. Multi-dimensional and multi-sided and this is where platforms can come very much into play to counter these forces, to combine, scale and innovate through a collaborative force; built on an ecosystem of partners, many cross-industry or being enabled to connect more directly with customers, who share in wanting value.

2. The primary operating system of the industry ecosystem is under threat.

The whole focus on applying different operating systems, such as dual innovation (exploit and explore) to counter the need to extend the core and search for the future is one, thez need to be in parallel. Another is the culture of mixing in the intrapreneur and radically different startup ethos (think Silicon Valley) where more capital is being placed into venturing, as well as learning to work alongside promising start-ups is gaining ground. Equally the management of intelligence drawm from knowledge and data, is forcing organizations to increasingly look outside their own walls. To become part of different ecosystems is partlz shaping this need to change, to evolve your Ecosystem. All industries are required to be making change, forcing existing systems to radically alter their operating and business model thinking and challenges the whole value proposition that can be offered in a connected innovation ecosystem.

3. Players must speed up the “idea to adoption” process

The emphasis of speeding up innovation is becoming critical. The ability to sense and respond to ‘breaking’ market opportunities requires a de-layering of the established innovation process. Lean management principles, alongside agile and adaptive techniques are all becoming part of the organization need to redesign the innovation process. The ability to learn a common language (of innovation), to work on collaborative projects that build new value. to speed up, scale and scope opportunities differently, requires new skills and competencies. Cracking complexity requires a broader network of expertise. How do you absorb, translate and bring knowledge inside to speed up understanding and design solutions that offer increased value to customers often complex but varying needs?

4. Companies are simplifying, moving away from the traditional high cost, complex system

Industries have created many barriers to entry but some of these have become their own barriers to growth. The structuring of multiple ‘stand alone’ manufacturing plants, built on past geographical considerations can be redesigned to reduce complexity. Car manufacturers have built ranges of cars, brands etc on common platforms so the supply chain can be simplified and costs reduced. The communicating and many infrastructure costs are continuing to fall by re-locating, outsourcing, shedding non-core activities to others, automating the process are all activities underway. There is a constant drive to simplify, standardise and streamline within organizations. The ability to partner within ecosystems, to utilize platforms structured to allow an easier flow (tracking, communicating, data exchanges, cloud computing) are getting the organization increasingly moving and investing outside of their own building to plug into the networks forming all around them that deliver better propositions than ‘going it alone’.

5. Maximizing asset productivity is critical

Irrespective, the present organization design is still governed in its build to extract productivity, efficiency and effectiveness out of the existing assets. Much as we wish to see a different model that is more inclusive of all the stakeholders, it still is highly geared towards shareholder return. These might be different in ‘returns’ and increasingly we are seeing value attribution more on scale and dynamism (Facebook, Amazon) than just financial return in dividend and bottom-line profit most traditional industries are locked into this financial orientation. This will continue to alter as data, intelligence, participation in ecosystems of value and platforms to facilitate growth and learning and asset realization shifts into more intangible, away from the older tangible bricks and mortar.  Organizations will be designing more for the fluid, adaptive and agile needs to be responsive to the constant and rapid changing needs. It is placing more of your assets into flows and less into stocks.

A new emerging form of organizational design

These were the five factors identified by KLN / Clareo that I think we all can see are emerging, these are universal in challenging the existing organizational structures and operating models.  The very nature of the organization is changing, this is becoming deeply disruptive to the inner workings of the firm itself and it will require platforms and ecosystems as part of the future management, that will allow for this internal change to form into new states of collaborative organizational design.

We are seeing platforms changing the dependencies previously sought by the one organization into ones that create, manage and seek out transactional value, dependent and reliant on many, at a real scale unimaginable in the one ‘stand-alone’ organization. It is transforming into a connection of enterprises that continue to build around a vastness of scale that aligns both to partners and customers alike, to engage and continue to adapt to the new competitive landscapes that are emerging.

The old linear way of conducting business of each to their own, is being shredded. The future form is based on value creation networks. The thinking of “just me” has become replaced with”the collective power of us”. Transaction facilitation becomes incredibly valuable and the positioning of orchestrators within the platform and ecosystem design is the most valuable position. We will need to re-equip ourselves to move ideas into market in different ways, those ideas to be of lasting value, with the need to understand and build on complexity. The skill is to break this down in the new design, for the parts to give the value each participant wants, from extracting their value from specific platform approaches and within an ecosystem that is broad and deep, highly collaborative and open. That is a very different world than the ones most organizations recently have been operating within.

In summary

The ability to capture value quickly, offers a very different way to globalize, through technology becoming central, based on connected collaboration and scale. This is both for the small organizations of today, looking to be the new emerging giants and the incumbents looking to leverage on what they have, with what they can potentially scale and extend. Value will be in the intelligence found and translated into new market opportunity. It is the ability to form networks and relationships, by working on platforms and within multiple ecosystems we will see the emergence of the new winners of business.

There are so many forces at work in fundamentally reshaping our industries today, breaking down ‘imposed’ borders and searching for more fluid ones that adapt and shape to the opportunity seen, becoming a highly adaptive ecosystem in design, reliant on platforms to deliver in scale, complexity and required experience to facilitate the job needed to be completed.

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The post What’s Reshaping Entire Industries? first appeared on Your Ecosystem Design Hub.

Now there is a significant “buzz” on AI at present but where it is really taking off is in China and one company needs to be followed is Baidu.

How Baidu is going about this is to build ecosystems that commercialize AI technology and then attract this ecosystem of partners and developers to accelerate AI into actionable knowledge.

Then we see the Autonomous Platform emerging……

Just released a further update

Chinese search engine giant Baidu is to spend 10bn yuan (£1.1bn; $1.5bn) on new driverless car projects over the next three years. The “Apollo Fund” will invest in 100 autonomous driving projects over the next three years, Baidu said in a statement.. The move is an attempt to catch up with US rivals by enlisting outside help.It now has 70 partners across several fields in the auto industry, up from 50 in July, it says

The launch of Baidu’s “Apollo Fund” coincides with the release of Apollo 1.5, the latest version of its open-source autonomous vehicle software. In the latest update to its platform, Baidu says partners can access new obstacle perception technology and high-definition maps, among other features”.

Reuters News 21st Sept, 2017

The Power of Multiple Ecosystems of AI technology

They have what they have called the Baidu Brain that offers more than 60 different types of AI services in their suite that becomes the meeting place for those external developers, customers and partners to learn, gather and share so they can extract the extended learning for all the participants within the ecosystem.

Baidu matches, perhaps even betters Siri and Cortana, as it has accumulated more conversational-based skills than anyone else- remember that most data wins. Their emerging partner system is lagging behind Amazons who have developed these into those skill sets as the ecosystem for this is larger at present in the United States but Baidu are intent on catching up and leveraging this in their own unique ways.

They are using their DuerOS platform in leveraging the smart home market.

They work with over 100 brands of private home appliances including refrigerators, air conditioners, TV’s, speakers etc. So they are in competition on voice technology. Baidu argues they might have a real edge as the home in China is smaller it offers a more attractive end-result through voice interactions and having better acoustic environments. So the majority of homes in China, India, Japan, in Asia and Latin America are more aligned to what they are learning in China than the larger home environment in North America. Now how long this is an edge depends as Alexa,

Now how long this is an edge depends as Alexa, Echo and Cortana are certainly focusing hard on the home and mobile total voice recognition market. Still we need to constantly look East far more today than in the past to recognize the emerging competition that are global forces to be reckoned with..

The Self-driving initiative called Apollo is what really caught my attention

What raised my attention, besides all of the above going on at Baidu, is their recent highly ambitious self-driving initiative called Apollo, launched only a few months ago. They have attracted in over 50 partnerships and those are becoming a “Who’s Who” of the auto business and service providers. The company has also been working on a self-driving car in its Silicon Valley lab that’s ramping up even more.

A clear quote from a recent interview in a www.wired.com story with the COO, Qi Lu, who was Microsoft’s Satya Nadella’s leading deputy until he left and joined Baidu was really interesting. Some of his remarks I find illuminating:

“ If you want to truly build digital intelligence to be able to acquire knowledge, make decisions, and adapt to the environment, you need to build autonomous systems. In autonomous systems, the car is the first major commercial application that is going to land”

“It’s just like the phone ecosystem today. The phone ecosystem is the largest silicon software ecosystem. I believe the same thing will happen for the autonomous system. The car is going to build a larger ecosystem. And the same set of capabilities—hardware, sensors, chip sets, software—will be used to build industry robots, home robots”

“We want to have hundreds of companies and universities all at work on this, building a very large ecosystem. Then we can build robots, build drones, and build all those autonomous systems. So, to me, autonomy is a key”

Autonomy is the key and the Car is the Application that is going to land………

Essentially, from where things are today, toward the future of being able to be fully autonomous, the fundamental technological path for the self-driving technology is the speed of iterations”- Qi Lu.

So where does that speed come from? Actually less from the (speed of the) car but from the data you can get to make autonomous realizable and to do this you need this ecosystem of collaborators to learn, exchange and evolve their understanding of all this means.

The aim of Apollo is to pull together all of those resources to make this happen on the Baidu platform. To outline their proposition to attract others into the Ecosystem was providing a clear manifesto of Apollo, a governance charter built on four overarching principles

ROAD MAP for Autonomous Cars within the Baidu Platform and Ecosystem

The ‘ambition’ in the dates comes from where the ‘rubber is hitting the road’ most likely In China or Singapore, the regulatory environment is very different from the US, they might or can be a faster ‘test bed’ for full Autonomous Driving and is partly why so many Global Partners have joined (see below for visual of partners)

The Apollo Manifesto Promise comes through a clear Governance

Firstly their  Apollo Manifesto Promise is worth a read but for me, here, yet I wanted to focus on their Apollo Governance (reproduced here as a great example of an Ecosystem Governance Model)

The Principles are based upon: Open Capability–Shared Resources–Accelerated Innovation–Sustained Mutual Benefit

From their web site:

“Apollo is an open platform whose primary purpose is to become a vibrant autonomous driving ecosystem by providing a comprehensive, safe, secure, and reliable solution that supports all major features and functions of an autonomous vehicle”

Apollo’s ambition is no less than to revolutionize the auto and transportation industries, and there will be challenges of unprecedented scale and complexity along the way. Given Apollo’s enormous potential to change the world, this historic opportunity requires a unique governance model that must support a highly effective leadership which is as inclusive and open as possible in order to swiftly achieve Apollo’s vision.

In order to safeguard the architectural integrity, system reliability, and rapid evolution of Apollo, Baidu is willing to step up and exercise its leadership in driving important decisions whenever needed while preserving active participation of the wider community.

The Apollo manifesto: Open Capability–Shared Resources–Accelerated Innovation–Sustained Mutual Benefit.

In essence, Apollo is the freedom from wasting time and resources re-implementing fundamental components and allows each member of the ecosystem to focus on their specific areas of expertise, which will dramatically increase the speed of innovation.

Apollo’s comprehensive, modular solution allows anyone to use as much or as little of the existing source code and data. Open source code portions can be modified and open capability components accessible through an API can be replaced with proprietary implementations. All this can then be contributed back to Apollo, redistributed, and commercialized.

Critical considerations such as ensuring reliability, handling failover, and guaranteeing security that would pose a challenge to most development efforts will be readily available components. Everyone can benefit from Apollo’s capabilities to improve individual competitive advantage.

Apollo provides high-quality code and data that allows anyone to bootstrap their autonomous driving development, but only with contributions from Apollo’s partners and the wider community can Apollo become increasingly more capable. The goal is to create a virtuous cycle where software and services are deployed in the vehicle to obtain quality data, which is then used to create an even more capable autonomous system. Accelerating this iterative cycle is the engine of innovation that will give birth to a viable autonomous vehicle and compelling services leading to a breakthrough autonomous ecosystem.

Apollo welcomes anyone to make technical and non-technical contributions, but the most valuable contribution is high-quality data, it is the very fuel that drives innovation. Baidu will seed Apollo with its vast data set that the community can experiment with. However, Baidu’s contribution alone is not enough to sustain Apollo’s evolution let alone realize Apollo’s grand ambition. Therefore, Apollo will create an innovative data collective that will pool high-quality data from Apollo’s partners, each of whom can leverage a larger data set than it can gather individually.

This innovative platform and data service create a lasting, mutually beneficial business model that accelerates individual innovation as well as sustains the growth of a breakthrough ecosystem. On a broader level, Apollo will engage academia, government, and the general public in order to convince and educate society on the acceptance and adoption of autonomous technology.

Only by growing the ecosystem together rather than through individual efforts can the full potential of autonomous vehicles and services be realized for the benefit of all.

The Power of their Platform within the Ecosystem

So Baidu is opening up their capability in code, in services, in data to all partners. In a highly fragmented market like China, this gives scope, scale, and speed of understanding. There are over 250 OEM’s in China alone. The data sets are in some cases offered with no strings attached but each partner has to contribute their data. They are applying the concept of “the more you contribute, the more you should be able to get back”

They are providing simulation engines so innovation should accelerate and as Baidu is focusing on its area of expertise, delivering high-end and value services, HD maps and security as outlined in their manifesto.

So far they have attracted some of the Worlds best within the Ecosystem.

With the potential within all these partners within the Ecosystem and working through the Baidu Apollo platform, it does hold the real potential of accelerating autonomous vehicles better than efforts so far in the West.

Summary

We know the autonomous car will take a long time, longer than most are predicting I would suspect. Yet Baidu is determined to find the ways to enable full autonomy. They believe there is so much commercialization ahead of full autonomy and they believe their data understanding can be a leading-edge provider, through this Apollo initiative.

It leaves me to wonder if this level of collaboration potential is at all possible in the West, as home markets are so mistakenly protected and jealously guarded, so collaboration has many hidden barriers that delay advancement and believe it delays the risk of disruption. I would suggest you use your home market to radically evolve, If the Western organizations continue to constrain themselves to making real, radical change when technology suggests it is feasible, it becomes a losing position. Does this form of collaborative offering by Baidu hand a real competitive edge to China in such an evolution towards Autonomous Vehicles?

Of course, politics can get in the way but the momentum and connected sharing of the partners concerned do make this more complicated to separate the global economy. Let’s clearly see how this evolves but this does seem to offer a leading edge for the Autonomous Vehicle that might make it through some rough patches ahead, as it is centered around such an exciting platform of Intelligence and Data flow to advance the vehicles design and ability to perform as envisaged.

It needs following as it develops as it really does seem Apollo is a platform to watch and how the collaboration within the Ecosystem thrives, with East meeting West.

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The post Apollo and Baidu: the Autonomous Platform Builders first appeared on Your Ecosystem Design Hub.

In this post I’d like to start identifying some of the key factors that anyone thinking about innovating or building a platform must consider.  To do that, I’d like to start, as the title suggests, by reviewing the first platforms.

The first platforms were paths, rivers and other means of improving human interaction and communication.  As interactions were improved and information flowed more easily, civilization, which is just a form of an ecosystem on a platform, developed.  Roads, canals and other forms of improved transportation simply became a better platform, and allowed the Romans to create financial and trade mechanisms not equaled until the 19th century.

Canals and importantly railroads were the next major iteration, connecting distributed strands of civilization miles apart and enhancing interaction and communication, lowering costs.  Along side the railroads a new technology was introduced which opened the shift from physical platforms to virtual platforms:  the telegraph.

The telegraph gave way to telecommunications, which connected everyone with voice and some limited data connections, reducing transaction friction and enabling the growth of more significant ecosystems.  These initial platforms morphed when the internet and importantly HTML and “the web” emerged.  This was the era of the “dot com” boom, only fully realized when  Amazon paired the physical platforms (shipping relying on infrastructure) and the virtual platform (data and financial exchange) to create a unified platform for retail that is gobbling up slow moving brick and mortar stores.

This quick review of the history of platforms signals their importance, but more importantly illustrates how much power platforms and the ecosystems they create are aggregating.

Those who study history aren’t required to repeat it

If we look at what made all of these platform iterations successful, we can begin to see a consistent set of attributes and features:

• Platforms can be physical (and were for the most part before widespread telecommunications) and even the highly touted virtual platforms still rely to some degree on physical platforms.
• Increasingly, however, virtual platforms and interaction are the norm only growing in importance.  Platforms like Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube and others have no corresponding physical platform, nor is it clear they need any. This is because they rely on content development and distribution, and consumer interaction with the content.  One wonders if, like Amazon, they will eventually move back to some physical platforms as well to offer a more complete, holistic solution for customers
  
• Platforms simplify interactions, reducing friction between suppliers and consumers, matching those with needs with those who have supply.  Paths and roads did this in the “real” world.  Telecommunications and the web do this in the virtual world. Good platforms enable connections.
  
• Platforms are often built around or on very important but narrow needs or value propositions.  Facebook was originally built to encourage interactions between college students.  AirBnb was originally built to share surplus housing space.  These initial, narrow value propositions could scale and did scale.  Not all value propositions scale.
• Platforms succeed as the network succeeds and grows, building on the network effect.  They can only grow as  communication about the platform escalates to those outside of the platform.
  
• Platforms must be somewhat flexible and agile, responding to feedback of the initial users and incorporating the feedback as they grow and morph.
• Platforms play an orchestration role, creating common rules, standards and governance.  In many cases these early platforms established the conventions or rules, or relied on old models (telecommunications and railroading) for the basics
  
• As growth occurs, the cost of transactions increase or friction increases unless suppliers and consumers can exchange without too much unnecessary data exchange or search.  Thus, good platforms must have good filters that allow suppliers and consumers to find each other with minimal effort, and find exactly what they want very quickly and easily
  
• Finally, good platforms require and trust is established through reviews.  This is a component of feedback and helps with filtering and establishing a rationale to use the platform.

Spawning an Ecosystem

If we return to the concept of the path or road as an initial platform, we can evaluate the platform attributes introduced above and think through the ecosystem that should be created.  For example, if the path or roadway is a platform, then it should be obvious that as more people use the road and more connections are made, some method to communicate how to use the road will be developed.  Thus, map makers emerged, leading to GPS.  And, since travelers didn’t always make it to their destination, roads spawned restaurants and inns, which in turn spawned information:  Michelin and Baedeker’s guides to lodging and food.

Every valuable, useful platform should spawn an accompanying ecosystem, which provides goods, services and information that the platform builder doesn’t want to provide or isn’t providing.  What draws the ecosystem to the platform?  The promise of access to a large number of customers who have specific needs.  Smart platform builders will build platforms that are easy to connect to and simplify information exchange, because even the smartest platform developers can’t provide all the goods and services required.  In most cases they can’t even imagine all of the opportunities or needs. Even Apple in its iOS platform leaves room for developers to build apps for their devices, although Apple’s platforms are far more closed than other platforms.  The relationship is somewhat symbiotic:  sure, ecosystem players receive customers and offer benefits to customers from the platform, but they in turn reinforce the value of the platform and often provide goods and services back to the platform.

Gatekeeper, tollbooth, billboard, data exchange

One of the most important questions any company must entertain is how to make money from the platform and ecosystem.  Some platforms will charge for connections – a gatekeeper model.  Some will charge a small fee for transactions – in effect a tollbooth model.  Others, like Google, will use a billboard model, selling ads.  All of these platforms will share one common feature – they will all create value for themselves and to an extent for their ecosystem – by gathering, analyzing and selling data.

Ultimately platforms and the ecosystems they support are data combines, creating and generating data that has value to the platform, to the ecosystems and to other vendors, producers and ecosystems.  Platforms themselves will benefit from data collection and analysis if they are able to use the insights to constantly rework and refresh their platform offerings.  Ecosystem vendors can benefit from the data through reworking their relationship to the platform and revising their offerings.  Third parties, not within the platform or ecosystem, can benefit from the insights gathered across the transactions.  This is what the older platforms missed – integration of the exchange, the platform and the data that was generated.  When the platform was a physical path, data was not recorded or widely distributed, today it leaves a digital footprint.  Now, the platform is just a data manager, capturing, collecting and analyzing all of the data across all the interconnections, exchanges and feedback loops.  A good platform should be constantly evolving based on its own analysis of the data and interactions.

The evolution of the platform

If we look at the history of the platform, from footpath to road to telecommunications and eventually to solutions like Facebook, we can see that there is a symbiosis:  as the platforms allow greater interaction, the platforms themselves find methods to accelerate and create greater interactions.  The platforms don’t have to begin with all of the technology or capability in mind, as long as they are scalable and encourage connections. The network effect will take over as consumers and suppliers are attracted to the platform, and these consumers and suppliers will attract the ecosystem.

This observation means that any platform can start small and can scale quickly, as long as it is purpose built to scale and to connect.  Look back to the old Roman roads.  In England the Roman roads were raised above the surrounding landscape, well built, with good drainage. There were many roads with many connections, speeding people and products around the island.  Today, many modern roads follow the same paths.  Think carefully about how you construct your platform – don’t worry about size at first, worry about connectivity and scalability and the rest may follow.

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There are without doubt real business implications in taking on a platform strategy as they really will be having such a transforming effect on all we do within companies and way beyond with others, including customers and even past competitors. They uproot the present and much of the established practicies.

They are changing the face of markets, industries, and competition but we within the established business world, mostly formed in the 20th centure seem slow to recognize their incredible impact, if we applied this platform thinking towards our own business, what would it mean?

There is a recognition that all innovation does not occur inside, it occurs from ‘open’ collaboration. It occurs from engagement and appreciating many others have better insights and possible answers, it is the power of combining them that has such economic consequence and great value creation potential. Our businesses are all becoming based on platforms.

The difficulty for many of us is first understanding what a platform is all about. The getting a clearer picture of the different types of platforms. Each has different tasks in building their specific “network effect” and how they are set up to interact and the type of problems they are attempting to solve. Some are really open, some are seeking growth, some are seeking collaborators to come together and work on ‘cracking’ more complex problems that one individual company would not be able to do.

In some of my recent updating of the platform breaking scene, I came across a terrific site that has created an open initiative to help entrepreneurs and organizations of all sizes to relate and build successful platform businesses, called Platform Hunt.

This Platform Hunt site has been created and managed by Michael Vakulenko @mvakulenko as the Administrator and driving force and Sameer Singh @sameersingh17 adding in his thoughts and contributions.

I wanted to simply ‘spread the work’ on behalf of the work being undertaken here. Platform Hunt is a public Trello board and their purpose is in building a definitive guide to platform business models. It has been studying around 170+ so far and is adding constantly to these. The board is open to anyone to submit a platform example to learn from the collective experience of others.

So far Platform Hunt has identified nine distinct platform types and what I wanted to do here is provide their definitions of the differences of these nine with a couple of examples they cite. They have written a very useful blog on “the nine types of software platforms” that does give a lot of useful detail, examples, and explanations.

All I want to do here is reproduce their nine platforms in their descriptions as I find these very useful to relate too, providing a few examples of the platform business model that fits with this descriptor. As they work under a CC BY, Creative Commons with Attribution, I hope this equally spreads the word of their work through this.

Interaction networks

These create networks of participants and facilitate digital interaction between them (people and/ or business). digital interactions can take the form of a message, voice call, image or money transfer. Examples of these are Facebook. WeChat, LkinkedIn, SnapChat, Twitter, Alipay, PayPal, WhatsApp, and Bitcoin.

Marketplaces

These enable transactions between demand-side and supply-side players. Price is set by the market participants. There is a high sensitivity for the variety of services/ products offered on the platform. Examples are Amazon Marketplace, eBay, Taobao, Airbnb, Amazon Fresh, Trucker Path, Kickstarter, Kickcom.

On-demand Service Platforms

These deliver end-to-end services fulfilled by a network of service providers. The platforms integrate matching, order, payment, fulfillment, certification, and confirmation. Price, quality and the fulfillment process are set up by the platform. They are low sensitivity for the variety of services/ products offered on the platform and high sensitivity to the availability/ quality of the service. This includes Uber, Amazon Home Services, Munchery, Makespace, Amazon Flex, Shyp, and Crowdflower.

Content Crowdsourcing Platforms

Crowdsource content in the form of text, images, ratings from a group of engaged users and make this context available to all users of the platform. Examples here are YouTube, Trip Advisor, Medium, Yelp, Gogobot, Pinterest.

Data Harvesting Platforms

Crowdsourcing data through the usage of a service and use of data to make the service more valuable for users. Examples here include Wave, Moovit, OpenSignal. 23andMe, Sense360.

Content Distribution Platforms

These distribute content by connecting owners of user touch-points with content owners. Examples are Google Adsense, Outbrain, Millenial Media, Smaato,

Technology Platforms

These provide software components as building blocks or services, designed for reuse in a large number of products. Adoption is driven by permission-less innovation of 3rd party developers who integrate platform’s technology and services into their products. The developer “owns” the user. Examples here are the big beasts of platforms, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, IBM Bluemix, Cloud foundry, GE Predix, Facebook Parse, Jasper, Heroku.

Computing Platforms

These connect users for the computing platform and 3rd party developers typically through an app store. Developers supply apps/extensions for the platform making it more valuable for users. The app store implements discovery, recommendations, and removal of apps/extensions. The platform “owns” the user. Again here we have examples like Apple iOS, Google Android, Apple macOS (OS X), Microsoft Windows, Chrome OS, SmartThings, Amazon Echo / Alexa, Slack Bot Platform

Utility Platforms

These attract users by providing a useful service (often free). The monetize by B2B services that use the data from the user-side service (e.g personalized ads, commissions, aggregated analytics or service fees). This includes Google Adwords, Zenefits, Google Maps, Kayak, App Annie, Tripping, ChatNbook, and eShares.

So Platform Hunt and in particular Michael Vakulenko have made a really good job of defining the types of platforms and providing examples of each. On each example, they are supplying a card description with links and brief explanations. I am finding these really helpful in understanding how and where platforms are expanding out across all industry and social realms.

They are asking for anyone to submit their platform example by filling out the form at http://add.platform-hunt.com

In summary

So please do remember this is the work of Michael and his team at Platform Hunt and as this is under the Creative Commons with Attribution please make sure you do credit this work, if you do refer to it as you think through your platform options

Platform Hunt is making a good contribution to understanding the developments of platforms and I would expect Michael is looking to take out his nine types into even more, once he has been informed and undertaken the due research as platform offerings are evolving with new business models.

Why not help him improve this public repository, we all benefit.

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Doblin’s ten types includes innovation outcomes based on channels, business models, services, customer experiences and other factors.

As a fan of the model, I return to it and reference it constantly, because far too many innovators narrow their focus and only create new product innovations, when markets and customers are clearly interested in much broader and more diverse innovations.

But as a fan of the ten types model I can also see some of its shortcomings, and one of those is its lack of “depth”.  The ten types model expands the perspective of innovation in terms of breadth – from a single outcome called “product” to a range or spectrum of offering types.  But the model lacks definition around “depth” – building a description of a platform or ecosystem of innovation. 

Paul Hobcraft and I have been exploring the idea of platform and ecosystem innovation for quite some time, and I think we may be in need of a new tool set or way of thinking that takes the two dimensional “ten types” model and extends it into a third dimension.  Where the “ten types” model expanded our thinking from products to a spectrum of outcomes, we need a new model – one that helps imagine, design and create innovative platforms and the accompanying ecosystems.

The genius of the ten types

Doblin’s insight when they created the “ten types” model was one of those “ah-ha” moments.  Without a model or nomeclature, innovators described and defined innovation, but almost always wound up at the same place – a new physical product.  Doblin realized that innovation was occurring in many different facets, and so defined these potential outcomes and by doing so created a mechanism to talk about different “types” of innovation, many of which were already occurring but weren’t often intentional or planned.  Innovations in business models, channels, customer experiences and so on were already happening, the model simply defined these options and gave us a framework.  Once you have the framework, however, it becomes easier to conceive and conduct innovation that anticipates a range of innovation outcomes.

While the “ten types” model hasn’t been fully realized or implemented by many companies, time and technology have rendered it a bit obsolete.  Not to say that the ten types aren’t important – they are – but increasingly platforms and ecosystems – the concept of “depth” in the model – are becoming far more important.  We can see this in a number of emerging companies and industries, especially in the so-called sharing economy where products like AirBnB, Uber and others are building platforms and spawning ecosystems, while leveraging the ten types model as well.  Other companies like Facebook and Amazon are also competing in the platform/ecosystem innovation game.

AirBnB as an example of a deepening depth in thinking

AirBnB is a platform.  It provides a means for people who are seeking shelter to match up with people who are willing to provide shelter in the form of a couch, a spare room or an entire house or apartment.  In creating AirBnB, the founders did acknowledge the value of the ten types.  They created a solution that touched on customer experience, on channel, on product and on value networks, all components of the ten types model.  But they’ve created depth by spawning an entire ecosystem.  On top of that platform reside hundreds of thousands of different dwellings, but also different experiences, different payment mechanisms, and one can believe different vacation or travel outcomes.

Beyond the offering, however, there’s still more “depth”.  Some observers will say that AirBnB has simply replicated the hotel model, doing what Marriott or Hilton had done. But this observation misses the point that many new participants entered the platform and ecosystem.  Most of those dwellings are owned or rented by single individuals, not franchises or large corporations.  The more “open” platform created by Uber and AirBnB, the “sharing economy” if you will, allows people to participate when and where they want, as they want, gaining value from excess time or space.

What else can we “platform”?

If we can create platforms to share space or share rides, what else can be platformed?  Any industry where intangible skills are exchanged and people are willing to consume those skills based on the reviews of others is ripe for platforming.  One could imagine an AirBnB-like solution for ghostwriters, for lawyers, for doctors even.  This simply continues the idea of dis intermediating middlemen and conventions and opening up the exchange of information made possible by the internet and feedback from the crowd.

However, as a platform is conceived and designed, the platform developer must consider the value of the platform to the ecosystem that could develop.  Platforms are for exchanges between parties – the ecosystem will include the potential customers and providers, as well as those that can facilitate the interactions, provide information, extend or guarantee the offering and those that will contribute content about the platform and ecosystem.  Innovators must decide when and if to consider building an platform and how to make the platform attractive to potential ecosystem participants.

The question that emerges beyond “what can we platform?” is: are their models or frameworks to follow that allow us to consider both the breadth of innovation offerings (ten types) and the potential depth of the solution that completely meets the need?  The answer, so far, is:  not really, but we can begin to imagine what it might look like.

Initial thoughts on a new “model”

People have been innovating and creating new products, services, channels and business models since the cavemen first ventured out from the cave.  To a certain extent, models describe things that are already occurring and allow us to approach the solutions with greater formality and intent.  The “ten types” model simply codified what Doblin observed happening with its clients.

We can begin to observe what’s happening in the platform and ecosystem world, and start to define some initial models or hints of what a model might include.  Platforms are inclusive, virtual markets where customers and providers can meet and exchange goods and services with exceptionally low friction, often with little regulation, ease of information exchange and payment exchange.  Additionally, beyond the direct participants, other vendors or suppliers will aggregate to extend or offer other complementary services or products, or information.  These ecosystem players add value based on the network effect, and in many cases the value of their participation scales as the number of players scale.

This means that innovators must think in terms of products, platforms and inviting ecosystem players to create a truly lasting value proposition.  In many ways, the platform and ecosystem will become the product or offering, but we must envision it as a whole and determine which components to build, and which will be provided by those attracted to the platform.

One tool I am certain will be a major component of designing platforms and ecosystems is the customer journey map, because as we fully recognize and understand a customer’s journey finding and using our product or service, the more we are able to design platforms that integrate those discrete tasks into consolidated workflows and eventually seamless experiences.  The customer journey understanding gives us the potential for this depth, that opens up our thinking to platforms and ecosystems, as collaboration efforts and co-creation become critical to satisfy the needs of the journey.

I’ll be thinking about this and try to add some more attributes of a model for innovators to use to consider building not just products but platforms and ecosystems.  Join us if you will.

The post Moving beyond the “ten types” of innovation first appeared on Your Ecosystem Design Hub.

They all have complexity, they all need highly collaborative platforms to exchange and build through, they all need constant focus on aligning individual ecosystem players needs with the vision and prospective rewards this can bring to all participating parties.

The more engagement with the final ‘consumer’ throughout the process of insight,  discovery to solution building, to eventual proposition outcomes needs the highest ‘active’ attention and communicating for all involved.

The really big difference between B2C and B2B or M2M is the complexity within the collaborators, the scope and difficulty of the challenge they are trying to resolve.

Each of the participants often has, perhaps, limited understanding or contribution but can ‘buy into’ a need or solution, forming around a system-wide vision and solution to recognize their part to play, the need to build a common language, reorient away from their own established working behaviour to be adaptable to many different styles.

There is equally a need to simply resist drawing early assumptions and find some form of ‘release’ from past approaches just built on their own experiences and see opportunity and value in potentially really different ways.

No one enters ecosystems lightly.

Most are dealing with complex adaptive system problems, searching for changing market dynamics. Be these related to many of our present “complex” challenges of cities, health, environment, mobility. These are tackling persistent problems as they are highly variable in potential solution and the hard work is defining the root causes and opportunities working on things in different, highly collaborative ways will bring.

Often scale becomes critical. It is the ability to ‘pull together’ many organizations to firstly conceive, understand potential problems and opportunities more deeply and then attempt to design and deliver solutions with more novel that breaks through past ways of ‘doing things’ that transforms the past experience into one highly valued by the final user, the consumer.

To get there it is all about a deep exchange and highly collaborative effort. It is not “superimposed” by the one provider and we then react in participation or not. Multiple B2B collaborations need to be iterative, collaborative, full of co-creation and constant knowledge exchange.

It is all about sharing, exchanging and valuing all those within the ecosystem that are there as they want to contribute as they see the potential for themselves and for their customers, in benefit and increased value.

When you recognize the value of combining resources you need to redefine your market. It needs to shift from the viewpoint of one (B2C) into the collective viewpoint of many. You need to take a very wide-angle approach to scope out the potential and determine the value-creation and where you see growth opportunities.

You need to figure out how to reconfigure all those disparate ecosystems built up by each of the participants, synthesize problems and sketch out solution designs that ‘might’ work in this collaborative space. The platform becomes the technology vehicle to manage this through, to connect and then deliver the (final) solutions.

Unraveling problems and then addressing them, briefly some differences:

B2C is fairly uncomplicated, (yet that is all relative) you go on the chosen platform and do what is necessary, be this to book something, purchase or simply stay in touch.

You, over time, build your preferences on choice of platforms that cater to your needs or interest. The provider strives for its easy of use and through understanding, constantly attempts to evolve to give you increasing value. These platform solutions seek that stickiness.

So as examples both a B2C (Airbnb) and C2C (Facebook) are fairly one sided serving specific needs. They rely on content, contribution and the ability for dialogue, they allow you to be ‘seen’ and heard, to transact and connect. They are more consumption orientated.

Whereas B2B aims to get past the multiple one-off transaction events. Loyalty is built in different ways. The value has a much more compelling proposition, it goes beyond ‘just’ user-experience into a more transforming one, where it provides a new value proposition that alters your thinking and current habits.

New value propositions drive more to innovate, making what you have previously relied upon as increasingly redundant as the value becomes extended. It is this “combination effect” of many joining into the ecosystem to contribute their expertise and solution contributions to firstly, unravel the challenge and then secondly, provide a solution that changes our present perception and understanding.

The present industry 4.0 as an example, is shaping manufacturing differently.The whole potential within Industry 4.0 will offer greater potential for cost efficiency, increased productivity and higher levels of preventive measures, all working towards optimizing the value chain (even more) and a different customer experience value chain will emerge, all in a more collaborative and highly connected environment.

Attempting a M2M ecosystem is the most robust and most complex, managing far more participants, ecosystems, and platforms, tackling complex challenges that are aimed to transform a marketplace and change its dynamics.Many-to-many collaborations are incredibly complex and different. Here is why:

For innovators, understanding the innovation opportunities in many-to-many ecosystems is paramount.  While they are more complex, more difficult to create and enter, they have to constantly seek more value, need to be longer lasting to change existing habits and will ultimately have the goal of offering more return for those involved or for the customer, greater benefit, otherwise why switch?

As innovators identify and build these solutions, the key outcome must be delivering a significantly improved customer experience. If those involved fail to understand the existing customer journey how can they design a new set of solutions?

There is a host of differences that need to be required in the many-to-many collaborations we are seeing emerging today. These are ones determined to change industry dynamics and disrupt or radically alter the existing market landscape.

It is the design of experiences for all involved, as any sub-par performance in the pursuit of a radical change from the start of something different to the final delivery is fraught with dangers of a poor experience, leading to a very expensive initiative that goes badly wrong, not delivering the solution that radically alters the market landscape.

See some earlier discussions on different ecosystems I suggest you might want to (re)read.

The interconnected parts of an Ecosystem

No walled gardens in B2B platforms

Seeing differences between B2C and B2B within Ecosystems and Platforms

Many-to Many (M2M) Business Ecosystems are fare more challenging

Adjusting to the Changing Landscape of Ecosystems

All Ecosystems are hard work, not just on what it can deliver but who you attract to work with you upon them.

We must never understate differences and difficulties within any platform solution be they B2C, B2B or M2M, it is not just customer experience but the collective experiences of all that chose to become part of a bigger ecosystem. A key not just lies within the robustness of the platform but within the participants in the ecosystem.

Although we have a multitude of options on the ecosystem choice, so much depends on three decisive factors.

• Firstly what are you wanting to achieve, as the more complex, then the more likely you will need to involve multiple parties, all contributing their expertise into a solution. Having a vision, translating that into a mission and then adjusting the ways to get there needs clarity, agility and resolution.
• Secondly , having a vision does not mean it automatically becomes a winning proposition. If you do not engage deeply with the final user consistently from day one and be ready to listen, evolve and reiterate your proposition you can face some very expensive failure lessons. Adapting as you go but staying highly focused on the end prize is critical.
• Thirdly, the robustness of your platform collaborators, their engagement, commitment and contributions is vital to be orchestrated to bring out the best from the individual contributors, all recognizing the end result is ‘greater’ for them in future value to participate and stay actively involved and fully committed too.

Ecosystems offer the transforming effect.

No, ecosystems are hard work but the promise of the ‘transforming effect’ can change the dynamics in the existing conditions that change markets, alter perspectives and create radically new ways to shift our thinking in different performance, actions, habits, behaviors and reliance into sometimes life-changing events.

These become the power and potential of managing in ecosystems, they alter the environment we have known into something different, hopefully better.

Get to know and appreciate the power of ecosystems, we need them increasingly to manage in this complex world.

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The post Ecosystem approaches are simply radically different, be ready. first appeared on Your Ecosystem Design Hub.

the changing landscape for ecosystem and platform thinking

We all are being told repeatedly that opportunities will increasingly emerge outside of the traditional established lines of business, as new digital technology solutions take increasing hold in our adjusting to the changing landscape of our thinking in ecosystem designs.

The issue is how we go about adapting to these and taking advantage of the changes all businesses are undergoing. These will be through different approaches to designing and extracting the potential value gained and will form around ecosystems and their management, through technology solutions provided by platform providers.

I am not sure how you feel, but It seems disruption is in everything, in what we need to undertake, in what is coming towards us in change. It has a common purpose, often far less sinister than promoted.

Disruption is requiring us to re-equip and open up, as we learn to deal in this changing world where connections can emerge from anywhere at any time, offering a new ‘line of sight’ onto an existing business concept.

We need to respond quickly and in those different, collaborative ways. Digital challenges are everywhere, to explore and exploit.

We need to engage in different ecosystems and participate in new platform learning to take advantage of the changes taking place all around us.

To quote Chuck Robbins, the Cisco CEO “We believe that no one company can deliver the full breadth of technology solutions that customers need at the pace the market requires”.

It is through the increasing intensity of using data and a deep analysis where this growing need for broader collaborations becomes so essential.

Partnerships abound, not just within a specific industry but in cross-industry collaborations. Ecosystems need to form to take advantage of many rapidly emerging market opportunities.

It is not just welcome to a world of ecosystems, it is learning to change from being exclusive owners into open collaborators, that build ‘greater value’ from the common need of working together, and many of these are increasingly cross-industry ecosystems.

Just recognize the changes we are undertaking in cross-industry collaborations are significant

If we recognize what it takes to build new transportation business models, it needs an ecosystem of public authorities, automakers, component suppliers, software providers and infrastructure builders to come together to make this happen

Within airports, train stations we are seeing a conscious integrating of all that makes up this travel hub, including connecting traffic updates, weather conditions, arrival and departures, airport shops, restaurants, hotels, parking terminals and flight or train understanding and on-line bookings.

All of this becomes a cross-industry and service ecosystem. It requires a host (platform provider), different apps, web links and consistent ways to integrate these so those using the airport or train station can navigate their way around their personal needs. It needs an ecosystem and platform management to bring this together.

We are increasingly expecting as consumers, uninterrupted connectivity, and virtual integration. It is this constantly connecting-up that is constantly layering mini-ecosystems onto each other so experiences improve as these ecosystems connect and work out what is needed to be delivered.

If we look around we are seeing increasingly the cross-industry ecosystem exploding.  

We have new ecosystems that are building new value in offering mobile commerce, building digital into all that we undertake increasingly in retail, banking, and entertainment. We are seeing new energy solutions emerge in Agriculture, Energy, Utilities.

We are seeing a ‘connected difference’ in the Automotive, Driving, linking to Postal services, electronic transfers, blockchain transactions, purchasing across most of our goods, both personal and in business and exploring concepts in Health solutions that require cross-industry collaborations.

We see electronic capital trading getting faster and faster by the application of data flows, analytics and software that automates the trading decision. We are connecting into Public Services to gain insight and seek new value. Manufacturing is connecting up through its Industry 4.0 drive.

We have Artificial Intelligence increasingly working, either in the background or foreground for decision-making. We are building platforms and connecting up the individual ecosystems of (internal) knowledge into these new creators of value, based on collaboration, mutually shared interest and vision and in the co-operation that emerges around the extensive use of platforms and technology application.

The smartphone is to date, our greatest ecosystem, and platform, as individuals as it is all wrapped up into one personalized connected ecosystem and the phone is the platform.

It is rapidly becoming the source of information, value generator and our personalized “dual world” as it learns what we need and is increasingly responding to mirror our world.

Just image the ecosystem of connectors we require within our daily lives, living in “smart” cities.

The opportunity to connect the providers of ‘hard’ services (energy, equipment, construction, utilities, etc) with our ‘soft’ needs (where to go, what we can do, order, where to park, what to do and see) requires huge collaborative efforts but the reward has significant benefits.

For example Smart cities attract ‘smart’ people that attract ‘smart’ institutions and eventually ‘smarter’ business entities.

The connecting brain power allows everything to manage their own personal speed of things, a flow that can potentially reduce redundancy and enhance engagement. The connections begin to reshape everything through the data; communications, public services, responses to crisis and opportunity, being aware.

The smarter in the use gets increasingly channeled, as this increasing flow of data to analyze, target and coordinate life in the city, can allow for a better way for all to connect to that city and personally identify.

It changes urban life as it involves citizens increasingly in shaping the future.A connected city.

This is a very different business model for all involved.

All of these new ecosystems ‘see value’ in collaboration and connecting with each other. If you participate you gain a competitive advantage, locking out others. You can share costs and risks, collaborate with other parties not competing in your initial space but looking for ways to build a new competitive edge that requires this cross- collaboration need.

Often it needs to be figured out as it evolves. That “test and learn” in controlled environments to then rapidly scale when issues are resolved and solutions are found.

Usually, it is the platform provider that has the potential edge but highest need to be technology savvy, as the role is demanding in finding solutions to the magic of “interoperable” across the different stakeholders and systems they are deploying. They need to deploy “state of the art” solutions and often this is where hosting in the cloud comes in.

New features and services can be deployed faster and it is then for the partners within the ecosystem to learn and adapt, it can become a rich source of being a significant “growth driver” to all those within the ecosystem, working on the platform.

Each organization involved will need to develop their own innovative business model to meet specific needs of the opportunity identified. Each ecosystem will more than likely have different partner enterprises.

If organizations themselves have not got into this “ecosystem thinking” yet they are in great danger of seeing rapid reductions of their position in the marketplace. Emerging markets are ecosystems, they are more specific, built on real consumer needs and will have unique features built into the local or global needs.

A changing business model means a (massive) opening up and letting go.

It has trust as central, it has governance as absolutely essential, in clarity, focus, resolve and need. It will need the flexibility to learn and adapt to align common objectives and solutions that are rapid to resolve numerous local conflicts.

Project management takes on a totally different set of dimensions when you are in a highly collaborative environment where performance is seen and swiftly judged by others within the ecosystem.

A highly systematic and specific tool related environment needs to be designed and constantly calibrated across stakeholders as well as within each company participating.

Creating and accepting new business models is highly demanding and requires a much higher entrepreneurial spirit that looks constantly to trials and experiments as part of the learning and a more open approach of never being “too proud” to not change the position or solution contribution, if it ‘advances’ the understanding and final solutions needed.

This sense of ownership shifts from internally driven to externally required to be highly collaborative, having this relationship and network mindset that wants to push often novel ideas that move the solutions along and accepts and enjoys the sharing of success within the community that is all contributing their ‘fair share’ into the end result.

Is working in cross-industry ecosystems different from our past traditional market approaches?

Absolutely!. The potential value or prize must be seen as highly valued and rich in learning and innovation promise, in growth and positioning, in competitive positioning as something not to be missed. It will challenge all and force them out of their comfort zones. It needs utter commitment but a clear clarity of purpose. They are in themselves disruptive approaches, both within the established organization and in the type of collaborative model required.

It is the new intersections of a product, services, different business models and collaborative partners and breaking out and across past industry borders, that can get “hairy and scary,” yet it is working in ecosystems and within different platforms that will become the future way business and social needs will be managed.

The need is to increasingly form a broader connected environment, and become increasingly digital and technology determined, open and highly collaborative.

To win in the future comes from Ecosystem Design and Collaboration

Winning solutions are coming from very different market forming opportunities and these just cannot be seized alone. They will need this cross-industry and public service collaboration to discover, explore and validate some really different big market opportunities that form around an ecosystem of partners. Managing the risks this entails is equally essential.

Partners that want to pursue ambitious projects that radically alter the existing dynamics of past traditional markets, intent on recognizing they are not only disrupting themselves but building a new way to connect to markets that are forming differently from different technology-led solutions.

It is leveraging technology in this digital age that we all seem to be undertaking this as we all want to see “the prize” that has improved knowledge and insight, growth and better value as the forming points to undergo the level of changes required.

Consumers are increasingly expecting it from this connectivity and knowledge access. The business provider now must find the greater potential than from their existing models to stay relevant to the consumer in this connected world.

The traditional confines of market boundaries are clearly breaking down and reforming around these ecosystems and platforms that connect partners and consumers in dramatically different Value-added ways and that ‘intent’ is driving a radically different environment to manage within.

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The post Adjusting to the Changing Landscape of Ecosystems first appeared on Your Ecosystem Design Hub.