Building trust in community relationships offers much

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

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

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

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

What’s Reshaping Entire Industries?

There seem to be multiple forces at work, ones that are reshaping how organizations are adjusting to a rapidly changing world, to operate within.

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. Continue reading

Platform understanding is growing

I have put some focus back on the platforms recently, as this is becoming a real imperative to understand the whole meaning and implications of platforms, with the necessary management they require, so as to enable us to rethink different business models for the future.

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. Continue reading

The Building Blocks for Managing within an Ecosystem Design

building-blocks-for-ecosystems-2Today business organizations are in need to put in place the building blocks for managing ecosystem designs.

These building blocks are offering the potential of new pathways to a greater ‘connected’ innovation, expected today, one that gives increased value to the consumer.

Yet the understanding of what this means in commitment and structuring has some clear implications behind this.

Managing ecosystem arrangements I feel requires a far greater understanding of the potential design, so you can achieve a more robust, open, dynamic and highly collaborative environment. Continue reading