Tag Archives: Ecosystem Partner Design

The crisis being faced in Precision Manufacturing in Germany- providing a different proposition

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I received this “I have a friend who runs a small – medium sized business highly specialised in high precision machinery for one critical part of a car, including EV’s here in Germany. The forecast for the car future in Germany worries him as he in a niche provider, content today with what he does but sees a difficult future. He needs options and wonders how he can “break out” of his single business rather locked into the Car Industry. What would the Intelligent Integrated Business Ecosystem (IIBE) do for him? 

I refer back to Bob Gravestijns really probing article “Germany’s industrial memory loss: Why an engineering engine is losing the ecosystem play” to help explain how a country can still have world-class firms, skills and institutions, yet begin to lose the architecture that allows them to learn, align and adapt together.

So let me speak to your friend’s situation tuned to the reality of German precision manufacturing, the automotive transition, and the ecosystem pressures he’s feeling. 

This will show exactly what the IIBE would do for him, and why it matters now, not later. 

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Building the Sensing You Don’t Yet Have Requires A Networked approach

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Events are running ahead of you. You have that feeling you are falling behind, competitively. You are not seeing your market the same, it is changing in front of your eyes. You are being faced by external events that seem to leave you “flat footed”.

Catching this early enough isn’t mainly a technology question, and it isn’t solved by one team working harder to watch more dashboards. It’s a question of organisational design — specifically, whether the way you’re structured to sense a shift is still built for a world where most of the useful signal sits inside your own four walls.

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The Decisions Are Already Being Made, Why Are We So Constantly Late?

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We are living in an event-driven world now, whether or not any given organisation has caught up to that fact. Things don’t move on your planning cycle anymore. A partner reprices without warning. A regulation shifts before your working group has finished its first draft. A competitor reconfigures its offer, and by the time your team has fully understood what happened, two more moves have already followed it. Reaction timehas become critical. The world moves in events; most organisations are still built to move on schedules.

That mismatch is what recognition actually depends on here — not “are things changing,” which everyone already knows, but “are we still finding out about change on a timetable, when the change itself doesn’t wait for one.”

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Business Ecosystems can unlock game-changing potential- lift up your eyes.

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Business Ecosystems can unlock game-changing potential

We sometimes get sidetracked, caught up in the “weeds” of making step-by-step progress, seemingly against odds that are often resistant and unyielding to the notion of change or alternatives to what we are doing.

Today many businesses are floundering in low or no-growth environments and applying approaches that just are not equipped to deal with today’s complex challenges. We are facing market conditions caught up in volatility and ongoing disruptions.

We are equally in the age of harnessing collective intelligence to be in a better position to address these complex challenges. The combined power of Gen AI, humans and diversity of understanding need to be harnessed to open up entirely new realms of possibility. Enter the power of Business Ecosystems.

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An Emerging Blueprint for thinking through Business Ecosystems

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Integrated Blueprint Framework for Business Ecosystem Design and Thinking

So why do we need a Blueprint for thinking through the Business Ecosystem needs of future business? ​

  • A blueprint is needed to thrive and find solutions in the face of complexity and uncertainty. ​
  • Ecosystem thinking and design should be central to this blueprint, as it offers the potential for transformative power and new impact, value, and growth. ​
  • The integration of business ecosystems needs the interconnected parts, with each layer contributing to the whole. ​
  • The three main layers are Strategic, Operational and Crosscutting in design and building blocks
  • The need is to move towards a more comprehensive understanding of the values of synergies, interdependencies, and exponential value created when these layers are interconnected.

We need to appreciate the real business ecosystems we need, they are radically different than most of how we presently undertake Business.

What we first need to do is appreciate this significant difference of what are Business Ecosystems BEFORE we jump into chasing different growth, impact or business opportunity. It needs to recognize the most likely outcome is likely to be a new collaborative Business Model and ask “are we ready for that?”

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A fear of missing out will drive you towards Business Ecosystems models

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The Yin and Yang of Business- opportunity and risk. Image Adobe

Are we seeing increasing complexity within the business world? The search for growth is having real impact from changing political realities, regulatory and market conditions. We are in a fractured and polarized world at present and we all have to adapt and change how we go about our business. There is more uncertainty and you judge this as either risk or opportunity. There is a strategic imperative to “open up” to alternatives to how you undertake business or accelerate it.

For me risk or opportunity are the same side of the coin, you can’t gain one without a level of the other playing its part. A business “yin and yang”, the opposite but interconnected and often complementary forces to drive our business forward by applying business ecosystem thinking and design opens up new competitive forces to build into your strategic thinking.

Is the level of “fear” seemingly rising and are our business organizations equipped or not, to draw upon the many alternatives that technology, Gen AI, platforms, networks, collaboration and co-creation opportunities that are offered to manage and rethink new opportunity and risk?

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Providing the Building Blocks of the Ecosystem Business Model framework

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Providing the full building blocks of the Ecosystem Business Model

I share this outlined design frame here, clearly to advance Business Ecosystems and provide a framework that enables individuals, groups and (multiple) organizations to begin to organize their conversations into the building blocks to explain and build Ecosystem conversations.

Business ecosystems are complex and often chase down challenges that potentially offer levels of uniqueness and significant improvement on what is existing or known as the existing solutions within the market place but are highly complex in their nature.

In my recent post I provided an initial Ecosystem Business Model frame to introduce and build out a common language and then took that into nine building blocks to get to the point of validating the thinking behind this emerging concept to decide in a further evaluation in a structured way

Providing the full Ecosystem Business Model is the next step

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Breaking down complexity, introducing the Ecosystem Business Model frame

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Building the Ecosystem Business model is a paradigm shift

Building Business Ecosystems can be complex to build, let alone explain. I have been working on an evolving Ecosystem Business Model for some time.

So many people are unable to explain Business Ecosystems, especially to others and it holds its evolution back. Let me explain some of my thinking here

I visualized a starting point nearly all should be familiar with, of the Business Model Canvas, by Alexander Osterwalder, drawn from his PhD thesis, supervised by Yves Pigneur (2004), called a business model ontology.

This BMC become a phenomena to enable us to easily describe what building blocks need to be considered for building a business model. As a visual chart it enabled us all to build a picture. It allowed us to describe, design, challenge, invent, explain and eventually recognize where to pivot your business model.

That business model canvas tends to stay rooted (or designed) in the single entity in its intention and as Business Ecosystems involve multiple and diverse stakeholders it helps but, in my opinion, does not reflect the design needed for these Ecosystem models.

In my view “In today’s interconnected world, businesses are increasingly operating within complex ecosystems. Traditional business models often fail to capture the dynamics and interdependence of these ecosystems, leading to missed opportunities of significant competitive advantage and exposure to increased risks that others are recognizing changes and equally on the hunt for new Business Models”

We need to build an Ecosystem Business Model story

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Moving towards the integrated future of Innovation and Business Ecosystems

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Heading towards 2025 on Innovation and Business Ecosystems integration thinking

Where I stand today that moves me to the future

Let me provide a really short round up of 2024 from my learning and explaining on innovation ecosystems and specifically integrated business ecosystems. Then I outline some of my plans for 2025 to build out the value of Ecosystems in business.

Ecosystems for business have an absolute need to be integrated, they are heavily interconnected. This post of A New Way to Drive Value Through The Integrated Business Ecosystem Design provides handy visuals depicting the different ecosystems that make up (my) integrated business ecosystem framework.

I have spend time on measuring success, defining the different components, exploring and extending this out. I had a recent post showing some key developments in this thinking with reference posts, moving towards providing a compelling business ecosystem case

I sought out a AI generated view from Google NotebookNL research assistants discussing why Ecosystems are really different to consider, which I found encouraging and good, easy listening.

The work in 2024 will gather even more pace in 2025

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A New Way to Drive Value Through The Integrated Business Ecosystem Design

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Ecosystems in the business environment are taking on a growing importance to manage greater complexity and challenges in unique collaborations than the one single organization cannot handle themselves, so limiting their growth and value potential

We need a different framing of Ecosystems, in appreciating the whole as well as its parts. Often, we describe Ecosystems in far too simplistic terms and fail to recognize the interconnected value we need to bring together from multiple Ecosystems and Networks to extract the value potential that is possible in today’s connected world.

In constructing these Ecosystems I have here provided a short explainer of the Integrated Business Ecosystem Frame and then a summary page of each of its parts with specific definitions and key component parts outlined. These are Ecosystems specifically dealing with innovation, start-up and entrepreneurial, business, dynamism, business, enterprise and enterprise to enterprise (E2E)

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