Tag Archives: Industrial Ecosystem Design

Designing our Innovation Ecosystems needs Five Considerations

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Firstly we need to put any innovation ecosystem into context. What are ecosystems, and why they are really valuable to consider when you are thinking about a more radical approach to any new innovation design?

Ecosystems are ideal for coalescing around a complex challenge, one that attracts and draws in all potential players who can contribute to sharing and relating to the challenges/goals and possible solutions, collectively. One individual’s contribution can’t solve this on its own, it needs this collaborative environment.

Ecosystems are networks of interconnected organizations, organized around one focal point, firm, or platform. They have both producers (that add intellectual value) and user-side participants (that add their experience and need), all wanting to focus and advance new value through innovation.

In any ecosystem, there is this need to recognize the value building and creation are both found upstream (producing) and downstream (consuming). It is this searching for the ‘combined effect’ that offers the more significant potential of sustaining value, by approaching new innovation in this ecosystem design approach.

So what do we need to consider for entering into an innovation ecosystem design? Continue reading →

Designing Ecosystems in Health Understanding

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Understanding any health issue is complicated enough, in how a doctor works through the alternatives as a “pattern recognition” when someone sick seeks help.  The diagnostic process is a complex transition process that begins with the patient’s personal illness history to achieve a result that can be categorized so solutions can then be applied.

A patient consulting the doctor about his symptoms starts an intricate process that may label him, classify his illness, indicate certain specific treatments in preference to others, and put him in a prognostic category.

The outcome of the process is regarded as essential for effective treatment by both patient and doctor(1). It is seen as “the clustering of signs and their development over time is, in narrative theory, defined as the plot, with this plot, eventually becoming the diagnosis.

Taking health systems higher into whole health systems

When you take health systems higher, into a design of a whole health system, the complexity becomes a magnitude of order to sort out that is way up there, in a different league. We struggle to find ways to capture whole health systems, perhaps until now.

There are so many gaps in our health system, to the point we are often just plugging parts thinking they are improving the system.  Actually, the opposite is often true, we produce a ‘knock-on’ effect that depreciates the system to make it less effective progressively over time or in surprising sudden fashion. This progressive decline comes partly from not understanding the complete Health Ecosystem you are in. We need to think about designing Health Systems in Ecosystem ways.

It is argued our health systems are failing as they do not address the “whole” health ecosystem, as we only tend to treat part of the system. The doctor is looking to cure the immediate issue, applying solutions that are often grouped as generative but in his judgment applicable to your need.

The question we all face there are significant gaps as the system really is one-sided, it is looking for speedy outcomes, and to limit the cost. This is a solution-providers need but is it coving the patient’s side by delivering value in one that offers affective capacity. Affective here refers to the underlying affective experience of feeling, emotion, or mood, both in its physical and mental capacity to influence and produce lasting change but also to provide a better health system focused on outcomes that work for the system providers and the patients’ perspectives delivering value to both.

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Responding to the corona virus outbreak- a Network Approach, offered by McKinsey

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Copyright © 2020 McKinsey & Company. All rights reserved.

McKinsey has been providing a couple of valuable articles on the coronavirus and offers up some thought leadership and business suggestions as we recognize the challenge this brings across the globe, in societies, and in business

Although they are providing the suggestion that leaders exhibit five leadership practices, it is the very first one that catches my eye. It is the setting up of a network and allowing it to be the response team to the pandemic and how the specific company is handling it. Continue reading →

Let’s Create and Rejuvenate with Ecosystems

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Credit Tatiana Plakhova @ complexitygraphics.com

Ecosystems are under-deployed or even misunderstood in business. Ecosystems are certainly growing in our jargon to describe something we think we want to achieve, but we fail to recognize many of its functioning aspects or needs to realize it. It is being offered simply as a buzzword.

The business ecosystem is an important business model you can deploy if you are having higher levels of complexity and growing uncertainty, and let’s be honest who doesn’t today? It can also be a way to reach out and have engagement and traction (Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, etc.)

When you are in the pursuit of having the best highly coordinated and geared to optimize performance such as a global supply chain, it is the complexity and integration that needs governance and the utmost attention to the detail and the flows. These are brilliant to “shave” costs, time and are working in predictable market conditions. Continue reading →

Economics, Politics and Climate need to come together.

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https://theconversation.com/humanitys-sustainability-is-no-excuse-for-abandoning-planet-earth-80699

In the last few months, I have got increasingly nervous about where we are NOT going on climate change.

The bush fires of Australia have been shocking, devastating, and crippling. They catalyze the concerns we all should have.

Each of us might or likely will face a shocking, devastating or crippling “event” in our lives in the next ten to twenty years. I feel it is inevitable, irrespective if we stopped all the debates and did the level of investment, we need to reverse the climate warming.

The next ten years of our investments in cutting emissions and refocusing our energy needs must go towards clean energy (renewables). Our ability to make a change will determine if these events recently will become the new norm, as our planet spins even more out of our ability to control climate-warming through greenhouse gases.

So I have to move through this shocking, devastating, and crippling effect but have I have begun to accept  the reality that our world is in a “state of climate alarm,” not just a “climate emergency.”

I have never before published one article on each of my three posting sites. This post I just had to. It is shaping me in how I look at innovation, collaboration, the power of networks, ecosystems and most of all, in our world of energy transition needed to reverse climate warming. So apologies if you see it on three separate sites but I don’t apologize for my real, underlying concern on where we are seemingly heading as a world.

Continue reading →

The Need for an Electrical Digital Twin

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Providing a digital twin solution in manufacturing is becoming a critical part of managing the complexity of the environment that entities have to increasingly operate within.

As digital twins become critically important, entities are beginning to adopt this “twinning” concept dramatically, and within the Energy Transition we are undertaking, it will be no different.

A digital twin enables a Utility, for example, to visualize its assets, track the constant changes occurring consistently, and make better decisions on the performance optimization.

Wikipedia offers a useful clarification of the Digital Twin.

“A digital twin is a digital replica of a living or non-living physical entity. By bridging the physical and the virtual world, data is transmitted seamlessly, allowing the virtual entity to exist simultaneously with the physical entity.

Digital twin refers to a digital replica of potential and actual physical assets (physical twin), processes, people, places, systems, and devices that can be used for various purposes.

The digital representation provides both the elements and the dynamics of how an Internet of things device operates and lives throughout its life cycle. Digital twins integrate the internet of things, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and software analytics with spatial network graphs to create living digital simulation models that update and change as their physical counterparts change.”

As the energy transition is presently undergoing such radical changes, the managing of energy and especially grid management is getting highly complex and the digitalization of this is becoming vital to manage differently. Why?

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The battle of the energy ecosystems

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We are currently locked into a ‘battle of ecosystems.’ where our very existence is requiring one side to win, it simply must, to be more dominant.

This ecosystem battle is between those that are highly vested in the fossil-based energy supply system of today and those that are forcing change into a more renewable reliant energy system as quickly as possible.

We are pushing so much of the principles and theories of ecosystems to the maximum test in the outcomes we wish to achieve, in the energy transition we require.

We are determining our future planet and what defines a healthy ecosystem in a very ad-hoc, self-determining way. The ambitions of so many vested interests need fresh evaluations in any new socio-economic structure. We must bring these two competing energy views into a balance. A balance that allows the planet to return to one where we, as humans, can be more in harmony with all that is around us, in the air we breathe, in sharing this earth in its diversity of resources, living creatures, and what it offers in natural wonder. Continue reading →

A dark day for the climate and the fight over global warming?

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Sadly, yesterday, 4th November 2019, the United States began the process of withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, notifying the UN of its intention to leave.

The notification starts a one-year process of exiting the global climate change accord, culminating the day after the 2020 US election.

The Paris agreement brought together 188 nations to combat climate change. The Paris accord agreed in 2015, committed the US and 187 other countries to keep rising global temperatures below 2C above pre-industrial levels and attempting to limit them even more, to a 1.5C rise. Climate change, or global warming, refers to the damaging effect on the atmosphere of gases, or emissions, released from industry and agriculture.

In a publication “The Paris Climate Agreement versus the Trump Effect: Countervailing Forces for Decarbonisation,”  IIEA Senior Fellow Joseph Curtin argues that the “Trump Effect” has created a powerful countervailing force acting against the momentum which the Paris Agreement on climate change hoped to generate. The real concern is that this decision will give instability and uncertainty until broader and deeper structural factors within the US political economy can be addressed as their (the USA) issues around energy resourcing, infrastructure, and urbanization are as much in crisis as anyone else. Can this national determination by the present administration go against the tide of so many? Continue reading →

The Orchestration Role in Any Business Ecosystem Design

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This visual has held my attention for a reasonable time. It deals, in my mind, with orchestration well for reflecting the managing of a business ecosystem and how to organize the partners and parts within this.

Although its original intention was a digital orchestration, it tells the story for any orchestration of platforms or working within ecosystems that a business needs to manage.

Here, the model is a singular operating model, but applying it to a collaborative environment has most of the essential components that need true orchestrating.

There is a growing body of work about “orchestration” and its need in the business world. Orchestration has become synonymous with managing or dealing with (specifically) external partners. The need is to learn to cooperate to produce something different and original, usually in a platform and ecosystem arrangement.

I am continually reading about scale, modular structures, governance, the advantage of asset-light business models where the possibilities of speed and breadth of open innovation need to “kick in.” Orchestration can take on a lot, but we need to define the role a little more, in my opinion.

I often wonder if all this orchestration through ecosystem design does achieve that radical breakthrough or have become just another solution or coordinating mechanism and a convenient “tag” to attach to it to consider? Continue reading →

Grappling with complex ecosystems, energy transitions, and planet earth.

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Source: https://theconversation.com/humanitys-sustainability-is-no-excuse-for-abandoning-planet-earth-80699. Time to go? Shutterstock

It has been fashionable to “hang” any network of relationships with the ecosystem tag; it has become the de jour or trendy label to suggest this announced initiative indicates it is complicated and highly valuable.

Well, in all honesty, most ecosystem “tags” are only an extension of building out a more significant community than the one previously, looking to deal with increasing complexity and expecting commercial gain, well that alone is not an ecosystem approach.

Ecosystems fascinate me; they do have a significant opportunity to change what is existing for something new. The need is to balance the healthy interactions and the conditions for that environment to flourish. Of course, many people might argue, “so what is wrong with what we have got?” Often I can’t disagree with this view, we do replace what works seemingly well because of our need to leave our own “footprint” in the world.

In Business we have “stolen” this ecosystem concept from its original meaning: “An ecosystem is a geographic area where plants, animals, and other organisms, as well as weather and landscape, work together to form a bubble of life.”

In business terms, we have taken this into these larger communities that interact through their network connections; they are dynamic or aim to be better than the previous structure. Continue reading →