Tag Archives: Ecosystem Management

Gearing up for sustainability in business is becoming core

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Sustainability is the new growth core in business change

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

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

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

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

The combination effect of ecosystems, platforms, marketplaces and portfolios

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ecosystems and Platforms, the new collaborative business need.

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Today business organizations are having to face the stark truth, either they adapt or die. If they adapt they accept a need for a radical redesign to extend their organization’s ability to open up in highly collaborative thinking ways. Today there is a real need to seek out higher impact and value opportunities to build a more sustainable business future.

“We are in the era of ecosystem and platforms to be central to our business future”

Changing how organizations have been structured and designed into something different, ones that are open, highly collaborative and sharing ideas and concepts with others to build more sustaining, value-adding business solutions is a significant change that needs to be contemplated and addressed.

It needs bold leadership to undertake a significant transformational journey. Technology offers them the transforming means but can they, as leaders, take their people with them?

Here is why they must: Continue reading →

Building trust in community relationships offers much

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Trust, dialogues and relationships often lead to new breakthrough ideas

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

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

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

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

The Constantly Living Dynamics of Ecosystem Governance Always Needed

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

Ecosystems can lead to four distinct value-adding opportunities

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

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

Distinctive Governance Challenges that keep evolving.
 Continue reading →

The viability of building out sustaining business ecosystems and platforms

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The viability of building sustaining business Ecosystems

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

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

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

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

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

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

Business Innovation Ecosystems

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Connected Network or Ecosystem Forming

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

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

Ecosystems offer us infinite possibilities

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The new environment providing by adopting ecosystem thinking offers us infinite possibilities. It opens us all up to new knowledge, collaboration and sources of new value and innovative impact.

We have new frontiers and unexploited opportunities everywhere when we push through today’s constraints. We have more connected hardware to open up our physical and digital realms, and thirdly we have access all the time to more real-world data than ever before—the birth of the digital and physical ecosystems that enable innovation like never before.

We have some awesome power available to us; can’t we unlock the potential to change where we seem to be heading? Continue reading →

Collective intelligence for a thriving and enabling ecosystem

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I have been thinking more about “Collective Intelligence” recently, so as to build more thriving and enabling ecosystems. I would argue we do need to change the way we work, engage and participate in sharing what we know with others and then find the connecting mechanisms, to build from this collective engagement.

The future of work needs to be managed so differently than today’s designs. Although AI takes today’s headlines it is the collective use of human intelligence that will radically alter the way we eventually work.

Let me give you a little background first on what is triggering this.

For the past year, I have been privileged to be part of an external influencer community, centered on Siemens. Presently we have sixteen external influencers coming together about every three months with a range of Siemens people, internal experts in Cyber Security, Smart cities, digital transformation, communications, Artificial Intelligence and increasingly becoming engaged in conversations with Senior Management and Board members.

We are only scratching the surface of a very big organization but do have very exciting possibilities, if we continue to connect and are seen as valuable and worthwhile in exploring different ways of working and communicating. We do have the real potential to influence if this group becomes more embedded in aspects that can shape thinking. Continue reading →

Wrapping yourself around IoT software stacks. Not easy to digest.

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Software stacks. This conquers up a certain mystery for me, so I decided to order up a plate to see if I can digest all they seem to be offering.

I am constantly reading about “stacks” when it comes to technology design. The IoT stack is becoming the “Thing Stack”. Really? Need to understand that.

Technology has layers that constantly are adding (stacks) of complexity. Each layer needs to be designed to integrate and communicate with the other layers in the stack.

So far so good for a layman like me but lets now dig in.

It is when we get to the open question of “what is a full stack” it gets more complicated.

This possibly means how much can you eat (consume), how hungry you are or how complicated your business is to determine the needs of a “full stack. Hence why I went for my pancake stack as you are always asked: “how big a stack do you want?” Continue reading →