Novartis Has Built Two Ecosystems. It Hasn’t Connected Them Yet. They Should.

Posted on August 16, 2026 by @paul4innovating

The Converging Forces We Need To Connect Up

Vas Narasimhan (the CEO, Novartis) has named it directly: becoming the number one partner in the technology ecosystem is one of Novartis’s four digital strategic pillars. That is not aspirational language dropped into an investor deck. It is explicit ecosystem intent at CEO level, and it is rare in global pharma.

Novartis has acted on it. Two remarkable architectures now exist inside the company, each sophisticated enough to be a case study on its own.

I took a look at Novatis and its intent though a different approach here, exploring the results from the Intelligent Integrated Business Ecosystem (IIBE) and raising some fairly important Ecosystem building questions on Novartis, based on my analysis as part of the Healthcare research undertaken

So these two remarkable architectures seem to have so much value left on the table. There seems much to do on taking these to a very different level

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Evaluating Bayer and Roche for their future Ecosystem potential

Posted on August 12, 2026 by @paul4innovating

Starting here in any Diagnostic for Building Ecosystems

Within my work on Ecosystems a significant amount of this is through Diagnostics that leads to Discovery.

Over the past month or so I have been focusing on the Healthcare section and through a number of my diagnostic tools assessed GE Healthcare, Siemens Healthineers, Royal Philips, Novartis, Bayer and Roche.

Why Healthcare? If ever the potential for applying Ecosystem thinking and design it would be in Healthcare. Yet there is so much fragmentation, current relationship constraints and design obstacles to. resolve.

I have posted observations on Siemens Healthineers (post here) and Royal Philips recently. Specifically for Royal Philips I did a very extensive Business Case outline over four posts as I took a broader range of my diagnostic tools to apply to them

Here I am focusing on Bayer and Roche, specially through my Nine-dimensional diagnostic. They aim to offer structural truths. They exist whether the organization acknowledges them. The diagnostic does not create them, it makes them visible. The ones outlined here are not part of the total evaluation undertaken, they are an initial snapshot that needs some more detailed input to gain a more definitive result.

The importance within the IIBE is the sequence, handoff, linkage and movements. In this case the nine components shown are here in these results more “stand alone”, indicative of opportunities for organizations to focus and evaluate each component, to recognise the needs to improve or spot the constraints.

The results for Bayer and Roche offered surprising and different results in the stages they are at in Ecosystem design progress

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The Siemens Evolution: three very different Ecosystem building stories hitting limits

Posted on July 16, 2026 by @paul4innovating

Billions invested in components are yielding linear returns. Think Ecosystems

Siemens offers three distinct IIBE stories related to Ecosystem building – each is within the expansion of ecosystem thinking and design. Different arguments applied to three related entities at different stages of the same structural transition. AI is only part of their solutions.

The need here is all about hitting ecosystem buttons across all of them with a fully developed evaluation, analysis and emerging proposition can offer the move that transforms individual conversations into something structurally compelling. This post outlines part of this and focuses on Ecosystem Architecture..

My work operates at the intersection of ecosystem architecture and AI strategy — specifically on how organisations principally design the governance and orchestration layer, that allows intelligence to compound across a multi-actor network rather than accumulate within a single node.

I see the architectural question as the “golden thread” that runs through these individual Siemens entities and their future direction each oif them can travel, if they recognize it as their essential next step.

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