Today we are still caught up in the validation and relevance of managing a business through platform thinking by making the business case of its value and impact. We should not be; it is time for you to hop onto the train.

The ability to present a compelling business case for the use and application of platforms is overwhelming. I think I have well over 100 plus arguments for their use, value, impact and application.

For me, platforms are needed as we face a very different economic landscape.

We need to choose where to focus in the future, where to concentrate our resources and attempt to bridge the fragmentation that is occurring. The world of collaboration, where we can find partners to share and reinforce what we do, is leading to new dynamics of combining.

Platforms are more viable and relevant.

Platforms allow you the opportunity to innovate in very different ways. They can add value through collaborations that can add more to the internal efficiency options through learning and sharing. Platforms help manage the difficulties of transitions we are all undergoing and change how we see the world through a broader collaborative set of lenses.

We are all being forced to make new Strategic Choices

As we look at where platforms fit within our business, we make strategic choices- are we looking for performance improvements, leveraging greater growth, tapping into a more distributed innovation capability or simply shaping new value strategies?

Today platforms are a key essential layer of infrastructure that scales participation differently.

They provide different options to improve performance and grow a new footprint in markets, products, and collaborations. Platforms can leverage assets and external capabilities you do not need to own or build; they provide fresh options to innovate, capture different and new value in insights and diversity of thinking, and allow for a higher pursuit of learning advantage.

We must consider the value of the combined effect of ecosystems, platforms, marketplaces and portfolios.

We can explore and exploit so much platform potential that fits with each individual company’s needs.

There are so many key questions to ask, to seek clarity too and how they can be positioned to reduce barriers to entry, commercialization and learning.

As we live in an unevenly distributed world, platforms can provide a better levelling effect, enable a way to thrive in a connected world and help offset eroding barriers we are all facing.

Let’s take FIVE underappreciated value points of business platforms.

1. Platforms are the new operation glue between end users, business developers, institutions, and manufacturing points. The ability to deploy digital software on machines enables the connecting, exchanging and talking to each other and managing a very different supply chain. Platforms are becoming the essential key layering point of infrastructure and operational management to orchestrate this through. They build out different assets, leverage the existing and optimise the potential within the existing ones to deliver a highly connected world to operate and manage within.

2. Platforms allow you to explore and experiment. Through the power of digitalization, you can re-imagine, capture, share and build from your imagination through a virtual world into the real world of realization. You have through platforms the process of honing discovery and collaboration, validating and extracting different designs, concepts or improvements on what you have

3 . Today, everything we build needs to be constantly reshaped, built upon in added ways, reshaped again and continually challenged and changed. We are in the world of circular design, and platforms rapidly become the exchange point for informing and transforming. Platforms are becoming the new flow centres that allow constant motion and offer disproportional potential, where numerous small moves can and do offer big things. It is how you influence this new set of connected dynamics that will determine

4. Platforms are the mechanism to resolve scale, broaden out the scope and enable a higher speed.  Collaboration and networks working through good business platforms can reduce barriers to entry by achieving access to technology advancements, having accessible tools and added infrastructure and enabling a more liberalization of one entity’s constraints in access to resources, learning and gaining from others.  In having available different financing options, scaling through 3rd parties and new avenues to talent and customers, different communities and sharing different and new practices all have a real combination effect.

5. Growing your business through Asymmetric Business thinking. What is your core? What will grow it in highly complementary ways? How can you cross traditional industries by leveraging what you have, combining it with technology and offering a higher value of what your core asset provides? Here we are dealing with the economics of compliments that depend on or require using another product.

So, where does Asymmetric thinking gain by being applied through platform thinking? Platforms provide you with new business model options.

Let me expand on this further as the Asymmetric Business Model opportunity requires a platform approach.

Google and Facebook are attention-based models that discover feed and generate the revenue that business pays through their portfolio of Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Facebook. Google has a search engine for users to find anything, and businesses and publishers gain keywords to build their content around. If you take the creation of software app development drives the demand for core products, home printers depend on ink cartridges, so they each can complement and reinforce.

The economics of compliments you find on a platform will allow you to diversify, connect and grow your business.  A digital platform offers software applications, access to sophisticated tools, technology, expertise, and learning. It builds out (your) functionality and brings different levels of flexibility that can sit on top of what you have already achieved.

I have taken five different aspects of platforms here.

The combination effect of what a business platform can achieve for you is actually endless in its applications. As I mentioned earlier, I think I have well over 100 plus arguments for their use, value, impact, combination and application that can be explored, adapted and combined.

Platforms provide you with new business model options that allow you to move across different industrial sectors that were not possible without all the economics of complementaries.

Ecosystems and Platforms are the new collaborative business need.

By applying different platform business thinking, you can consider commoditising different aspects of your business value to strengthen your core assets in new value-added ways. Most importantly, you have the (equal) chance of bundling complementaries with your core from software and digital offerings and combining AI & Human intelligence to effectively compete and differentiate yourself with leverage that gives added value to your customers..

For instance, you can own and control less but share and partner more as you shift from a given asset into a collective intelligent one, leveraging all the essential parts that having access to a technology platform can provide.

Platforms are about organizing and resolving complex structures, they offer a new network business model that needs to be deployed to meet a new economic landscape. They can be a fundamental building block to finding new ways of business value creation, offering that base to a new model of collaboration and competition.

I have outlined a case for change in a recent article, “thinking out the evolution of platforms and ecosystems.” if you have the opportunity and time

I would argue platforms are your future business journey.

They are highly relevant for growth and diversification and offer a sustainable pathway. You build more dynamic capabilities to sense and seize opportunities quicker in your highly connected world.

The post Exploring points of value in adopting Business Platforms. first appeared on Your Ecosystem Design Hub.

A three-part series of posts exploring the what, why and how of Siemens Xcelerator- this is part three– how it does it and why.

This post is about “how Siemens Xcelerator does it and why,” from my perspective.

My aim in three separate posts all linked here is to explore the Siemens Xcelerator, firstly what it is, secondly, what it does and thirdly, how it does it.

These three posts are “looking into” Siemens. I am looking from the outside to see the value of this launch announcement of the Siemens Xcelerator Digital Business Platform. The launch proposal offers much.

How Siemens Xcelerator does it and why means what?

The stated objective: “Siemens AG has launched an open digital business platform, Siemens Xcelerator, to accelerate digital transformation and value creation for customers of all sizes in industry, buildings, grids and mobility. The business platform makes the digital transformation easier, faster and scalable.”

The real key here is the open connections between solutions and all engaged parties in the interactions and transactions.

What, why and how of the need for a B2B Digital Business Platform

The evolution of platforms needs to be thriving business ecosystems that offer a radical change in emphasis for all to collaborate around, share and build together. Achieving this requires an ecosystem mobilization and a platform strategy that delivers open technical and commercial frameworks, has a high ease of use and implementation ethos and looks to provide superior value creation and implementation.

Siemens Xcelerator digital business platform sets out to provide those three essential pillars needed 1) a thriving ecosystem of partners, 2) a growing, robust portfolio of bundled solutions to meet specific needs, and 3) a marketplace where interactions and transactions can be made to purchase hardware, software and service solutions, that are tailored to individual needs.

Bringing the Platform offering together

The depth and breadth of the collaborations and engagement undertaken between the participants will drive toward different value propositions. To specifically build a platform that seeks interaction and engagement from developers, and start-ups, seek involvement from SMEs to big tech companies, to draw in services, consulting, and integration partners, all forming the enabling environment.

Siemens Xcelerator sets out to provide the mechanisms to recombine technology and provide multiple new logic layers to build upon today’s existing business logic by bringing together the technical applications that are modular, cloud-connected and built on standard application interfaces (APIs) that adhere to the design principles of interoperability, flexibility, openness and as-a-service where offerings are constantly upgraded.

It is the rich choice provided in portfolio offering, ecosystem partners and a marketplace selection coming together that are providing the right technology and solutions that provide the robust platform to seek out information, advice, and expertise. This combination effect enables a thriving community that can explore in confidence, have levels of protection and trust and refer to user experiences to evaluate compatibility within their specific operating and business environment.

Ones that can accelerate the digital transformation by offering growing customization, easier, faster and scalable solutions through growing levels of cooperation and collaboration, A “go-to source” where discoveries and existing solutions become interoperable, increasingly personalized and customized to solve individual problems yet can become repeatable and scalable, assembled and disassembled to meet changing circumstances or market conditions.

The essential need for Platforms and Ecosystems in today’s business world

Ecosystems and platforms are not today’s story of partners simply selling, delivering and servicing the offering, but it is about collaborating, engaging, mobilizing, creating, and designing within a network of partners that see real value in the ecosystem, one that builds out on open, shared value models.

I repeat a quote from Peter Koerte, the Chief Technology and Strategy Officer at Siemens, who recently stated in a podcast: “It’s a complex task. You need to have the hardware; you need to have software; you need services. So, nobody holds the key, nobody. So, there you go. You need to have an ecosystem that is orchestrated where you have created a portfolio delivered to our customers or to the customer to solve their problems. And that’s where we realized that Siemens very often already held the key with regards to having some of the critical components already, but not all of them. And so, we clearly said, okay, if we can bring them all together: the service providers, the software partners and the hardware – and this is very important, including the hardware – then we can make a big difference.”

Today it is suggested that 70% of digital transformations fail, so we need a different approach.

So, why do digital transformations fail? The barriers are made of several significant impediments; often of inherent inefficiencies, the fear of disrupting the traditional business model process by changing technology or existing architecture, having the constant concern of dealing with business continuity if you set about undergoing change, will the results keep that remaining competitiveness or bring about a new business positioning all contribute into the varying levels of mindset about adopting technology adoptions, and the concerns of deciding the right investments that prevail today. There is a real complexity in solutions and managing any digital transformation.

The future is emerging but in highly collaborative ways.

Today in business, the recognition is this need to be constantly redefining and improving performance, requiring a continuous evolution to accommodate the pace of technologies pace of change, coupled with the new emerging technologies of machine learning, automating data analytics, AI, Automation options and the sheers scale of data sets stored increasingly in the cloud to extract insights and fresh value.

To position today and for the future, there is the need for flexibility, adaptivity, agility and innovation. Being positioned for being stronger in response and resiliency. Adopting the organization to a constant stream of knowledge insights, combining connected learning and requiring continuous learning. All of this requires a radical change. It needs a community, a thriving, evolving ecosystem of like-minded or valued supporters to help you to adapt and change, to accelerate the digital transformation. Those who network, collaborate and co-create are better positioned to adapt and provide a more sustainable business connected and responsive.

Business today is also recognizing the value of as-a-service to support scale, take advantage of constant change in providing continued updates, and manage a business to its throughput and needs. You need as much fluidity in your assets as you can manage.

Ecosystems and platforms are better positioned to handle future dynamics.

Today, the market environment is constantly dynamic and rapidly changing, more competitive and demanding. The best chance of achieving sustainable revenue is to be highly fluid and adaptive to meet these rapid changes. In modifying and adapting to changing conditions, the key is achieving an adaptive, flexible operating environment, this requires it to be fully digitally connected, respond and adapt swiftly, and align with the right partnerships and networks, to draw down expertise and solutions. Being part of a thriving ecosystem is becoming essential to meet these rapidly changing and ongoing market conditions.

Siemens is well-positioned as a leading Industrial and Technology company in B2B solutions covering industry, buildings, grids and mobility to facilitate and orchestrate a digital business platform. Siemens has the expertise, history and trust built up over 170 plus years. The Siemens Xcelerator is designed for openness, reusability, and interoperability through a partner and customer network to solve individual customer problems.

Placing software, hardware, and services in a network of partners and customers at the core of Siemens Xcelerator solutions allows innovators, developers, pioneers, and businesses of any size to come together and solve complexity in easier, faster, and scalable ways. The solutions are designed as building blocks that are basically fundamental elements, so these can be deployed across various contexts and challenges.

Solutions can be built, combined and optimized more contextually while gaining from leveraging these components built up in common open standards and defined specifications. for this, interoperability and contribution to larger solution systems, providing a plug-and-play across each other and a re-bundling effect through additional new building blocks that “build on” for continued improvements.

The bottom line for Siemens in their rationale to launch this Xcelerator digital business platform is to find solutions with partners that set about breaking down data silos and customer challenges helping companies to increase their performance, productivity, flexibility and sustainability to enable faster innovation and value creation, to transform even further on what they have today.

To succeed, you need to imagine a dynamic, living system constantly being used, explored, improved upon and having value extracted continuously; Siemens Xcelerator’s digital business platform, I feel, is aiming to be positioned as highly valuable in a B2B environment to contribute to and accelerate the digital transformation. The power of the ecosystem of partners in building a portfolio of modular solutions and providing these in a marketplace open to all offers a radically new approach to tackling industrial design as it is highly collaborative and relationship dependent.

Disclaimer: This article is published in partnership with Siemens. Siemens is paying for my engagement, not for promotional purposes. Opinions are my own

The post Siemens Xcelerator- part three- how it does it and why. first appeared on Your Ecosystem Design Hub.

A Series of Posts exploring the what, why and how of Xcelerator- part two

In this series, I felt there is a need for a deepening or exploring of what Siemens Xcelerator is all about. What are the implications and value opportunities for customers, distributors, partners, or analysts?

My aim in three separate posts all linked here is to explore the Siemens Xcelerator, a new Digital Business Platform, firstly what it is, secondly, what it does and thirdly, how it does it.

These three posts are “looking into” Siemens. I am looking from the outside to see the value of this launch announcement of the Siemens Digital Business Platform. The launch proposal offers much. The first post I recommend reading provides context to “what Siemens Xcelerator is.”

This post is about “what it does,” from my perspective.

The stated objective is that “Siemens AG has launched an open digital business platform, Siemens Xcelerator, to accelerate digital transformation and value creation for customers of all sizes in industry, buildings, grids and mobility. The business platform makes the digital transformation easier, faster and scalable.”

Peter Koerte, the Chief Technology and Strategy Officer at Siemens, recently stated in a podcast, “Xcelerator not only brings all of the critical digitalization components together – the service providers, the software partners and especially the hardware – it also provides both technical governance and interoperable solutions.

You realize this Xcelerator launch is very much for the longer gameplay.

Peter also provided further insights “At Siemens, we serve many different customers. So we are doing this in industry, we are doing this in buildings and infrastructure, and we’re doing this in mobility. And we saw that there is an incredible amount of work that goes into digital transformation and that many customers are coming to us and asking, please, can you help us?”

“The realization was, look, what we want to bring to our customers is solutions that are easy, fast and scalable. And this is what we hear over and over again: you have a bespoke solution that doesn’t work for me”.

The idea is to follow these design principles and provide more tailored solutions.” Peter then went on to explain: “it’s like Lego blocks where you very easily assemble and disassemble, and you just pick what you need. You really can get to these easy, fast and scalable solutions for our customers.”

Peter then explained: “And it’s a complex task. You need to have the hardware; you need to have software; you need services. So nobody holds the key, nobody. So, there you go. You need to have an ecosystem that is orchestrated where you have created a portfolio delivered to our customers or to the customer to solve their problems. And that’s where we realized that Siemens very often already held the key with regards to having some of the critical components already, but not all of them. And so we clearly said, okay, if we can bring them all together: the service providers, the software partners and the hardware – and this is very important, including the hardware – then we can make a big difference.”

The recognition from these positioning statements is that solutions have to be open, flexible, personalized and to be individually customized and need interoperable solutions to clearly work with each other then we come to What Xcelerator intends to provide.

Let’s step back from this terrific set of insights and have a back-to-basics review.

To cater for this strategic ambition, the B2B market needs, first and foremost, a change in emphasis, one of thinking out the evolution of platforms into ones designed to build thriving business ecosystems (B2B enabled) for all to collaborate around and build together.

So what is the Siemens Digital Business Platform?

What if you now reflect on what Siemens is proposing- a more open, collaborative platform, sharing their substantial portfolios, building out an ecosystem of certified partners as well as building out a marketplace of solutions that can be applied across the most significant markets of Industrial application, Buildings, Energy Grids and Transport. A Digital Business Platform that is governed as an intelligent, integrated and orchestrated one, provided in a single source and place but open, collaborative and certified.

So the “What If”becomes clearer in my mind.

The purpose is to create new product services and business models in the solutions provided. Solutions that accelerate revenues drive efficiencies through automation, improve profitability, enhance the customer experience, ensure compliance and link the ecosystem of partners for revenue and operational solution delivery for new client opportunities and improvement. Driving the digital transformation.

It needs to ask basic questions like, “can this proposal overcome the inherent inefficiencies overcome the disruptive traditional forces and present restricted business models?” “Can the solutions enable more sustainable business continuity? Can it change the nature of competitive advantage and shift the present mindset about technology adoption and risk?

Seeing a future and embracing it

Perhaps it is likely that Siemens recognizes where the future of digital transformation needs to go and sees a better approach to this digital transformation through this launch. A view reflecting that digital transformation requires a continuous evolution, fundamentally redefining the business operation and customer experience in highly connected, digital ways across an ecosystem of like-minded solution providers. Siemens, for me, has signalled that they are moving towards a new business model to take them even further as a focused technology company.

Siemens is opening up their solutions, combining these with others so the platform can provide a stronger response, a more resilient, agile, flexible and knowledge intense digital and real-world potential to boost productivity and competitiveness to scale up innovation through a digital transformation.

Siemens has signalled a new journey in a world that seems in a continuous state of flux and needs a more connected ecosystem, portfolio agility and robust, growing Marketplace for all to shop based on the Xcelerator Digital Business Platform (Website here)

So what Xcelerator Digital Business Platform does?

Digital Business Platforms create new digital business capabilities by recombining existing technologies and providing the platform for partners, customers and providers of services to come together and take these often individual solutions into a new level of connection to integrate these technologies, concepts and ideas to create new and disruptive capabilities that accelerate the community and advance the digital transition.

Any platform certainly needs to be of architecturally sound design to maximize the opportunities this recombination offers to digital transformation. Xcelerator is positioning itself to provide that as the platform orchestrator and provide the governance and undertake the lead. Xcelerator can transform.

You certainly stimulate ideas in platforms through engagement and interactions in a community-centric marketplace.

A critical part is to leverage data and as well as exchange ideas, build out software solutions within the collaboration space. Marshall Van Alstyne, who co-authored a great book “Platform Revolution” is the Questrom Chair Professor, Boston University and a Digital Fellow at MIT, commented on the power of leveraging data: “What I think is interesting,” Marshall stated, “is that one of the impediments to B2B [business-to-business] platforms has been [that] we haven’t had the frequency of interaction we’ve had in B2C [business-to-consumer] platforms. Machine to machine, device to device, will dwarf the number of interactions among people. And so, I think we should absolutely anticipate huge transitions towards these platforms and these models………to capture the value created”

Delivering digital transformation easier, faster and at scale

So for me, a strong platform for building out a growing portfolio, connecting an ecosystem and providing a marketplace does offer all involved the opportunity to create, deliver and capture new value in what the platform provides if it applies the governance and design principles, and rigour suggested, is timely and can transform the market dynamics in radically different ways.

Siemens Xcelerator offers the power of the network effect, a growing ecosystem of partners, designers, distributors and customers who can jointly accelerate the digital transformation. Today it is collaborations, relationships, cocreation and customer-centric solutions that change today into tomorrow for a different, connected future.

My third post is the last in this initial series that looks deeper into Siemens Xcelerator and explores “how it does it” coming up next.

Disclaimer: This article is published in partnership with Siemens. Siemens is paying for my engagement, not for promotional purposes. Opinions are my own

The post Siemens Xcelerator Part Two- what it does first appeared on Your Ecosystem Design Hub.

Siemens has signalled a new journey in a world that seems in a continuous state of flux.

One that needs a more connected ecosystem, portfolio coupled with a robust, growing Marketplace for all to explore, based on the Siemens Xcelerator Digital Business Platform (Website here) that will enable a greater digital transformation and value creation for customers of all sizes in industry, buildings, grids and mobility.

The stated objective is that “Siemens AG has launched an open digital business platform, Siemens Xcelerator, to accelerate digital transformation and value creation for customers of all sizes in industry, buildings, grids and mobility. The business platform makes the digital transformation easier, faster and scalable.”

In a Series of Articles, I will be exploring the what, why and how of Siemens Xcelerator.

I felt there is a need for a deepening or exploring of what Xcelerator is all about. What are the implications and value opportunities for customers, distributors, partners, or analysts?

This post is about “what it is,” from my perspective

My aim in three separate posts all linked here is to explore the Siemens Xcelerator, firstly what it is, secondly, what it does and thirdly, how it does it.

These three posts are “looking into” Siemens. I am looking from the outside to see the value of this launch announcement of the Siemens Digital Business Platform. The launch proposal offers much.

Let’s break this “what it is” up into the critical parts

Firstly what does open mean?

Clarity always needs to be made on what open means for the digital business platform. Is this platform any different from the others claiming to offer a platform solution? The customer today constantly worries over any form of lock-in, and the need to spell out what open means becomes paramount.

As I understand it, there is no “vendor lock-in, it is open, and the data resides as and where the customer determines. Secondly, over time, the entire portfolio of hardware and software will become modular, cloud-connected and built on standard application programming interfaces (APIs) to allow open access.

Another critical ‘open’ is that Siemens Xcelerator includes a curated portfolio of internet of things (IoT) to enable hardware, software and digital services across Siemens and certified third parties. Siemens is building a growing ecosystem of partners; and an evolving marketplace to facilitate interactions and transactions between customers, partners and developers.

The open digital business platform creates value for participants by facilitating interactions and fostering innovation between multiple parties – customers, partners, developers etc., as no one can do it alone.

A curated platform

The “curated part” for IoT-enabled hardware, software and digital services will follow key design principles of interoperability, flexibility, openness and as-a-service. This set of design principles enables APIs to be interoperable – to work.

An API stands for Application Programming Interface. API is a machine-to-machine interface where one machine makes a request, and the other machine responds to it. The interface can be thought of as a contract of service between two applications. This contract defines how the two communicate with each other using requests and responses. Interoperability is the ability of different systems, devices, applications or products to connect and communicate in a coordinated way, without effort from the end-user.

This makes whatever is offered on the Siemens Digital Business Platform open to enable data to exchange freely. That exchange of data is what Digital Transformation is about, generating data insights and connecting the physical world, i.e. machines and the data virtual world, to be able to simulate, predict, monitor, anticipate and achieve the potential to connect your operating world up with others that bring a different value, in speed, value or business model.

We now come to the actual value points of “what it is” from this Siemens Xcelerator Digital Business Platform.

 

Recognizing the interlinked three pillars of this open Digital Business Platform

Firstly the PORTFOLIO is building quite naturally out on the four main parts of Siemens AG’s current business, of leading solutions for industry, buildings, grids and mobility of its entire portfolio of internet of things (IoT) enabled hardware, software and digital service, not only from Siemens but increasingly from certified third parties made up from hyperscalers to independent software vendors.

The portfolio is transformed towards more open applications, with more cloud-based and as-a-service solutions and IoT-enabled hardware that can be constantly upgraded. At the same time, the collaboration will reach a new level with a growing ecosystem of partners.”

Suppose you are looking for accelerating digital transformation within your organization, no matter your business size or industry. In that case, Siemens Xcelerator makes collaboration easy and gives you access to a vibrant ecosystem of partners, developers and peers. This portfolio will encourage a growing ecosystem of partners that share the design principles of interoperability, flexibility, openness and as-a-service to build a growing portfolio.

The ability to build a vibrant ECOSYSTEM of Partners

Presently there are over 50 credited partners, including the hyperscalers of Accenture, Atos, Bentley, Deloitte, Microsoft, Nvidia and SAP but the value in exploring this growing ecosystem is the niche company or a specialist in a given application or solution that has deep domain knowledge of the industry application.

The Siemens certified partners ecosystem is set to expand rapidly now that the launch is behind Siemens.

Recently, I published an article on Siemens is building a powerful industrial partner ecosystem. That links to the growing international partner network, and the global partner finder can be found on the website. https://new.siemens.com/global/en/company/topic-areas/partners/industry.html).

If you are interested in becoming a Siemens Ecosystem Partner, so you can together innovate faster and enhance business outcomes for customers, go to this link.

The MARKETPLACE that is offering scope, content and functionality selection for your business

A Marketplace positioned today as an underlying and evolving marketplace to explore, educate, exchange and purchase. The Marketplace is set up to 1) Build & Sell, 2) Consult and Service or 3) Enable and Run. The Marketplace breaks down the topics and the vertical market searches, so potential solutions can be identified easily. Go to this link to explore the Marketplace.

There are 200 solution offerings within the Marketplace offering scope, content and functionality. Although Siemens covers a wide range of industries, the current vertical markets are Commercial Buildings, Higher Education, Food & Beverage, Healthcare, Pharmaceutical & Life Science, power Utilities and Transport. The Topics are presently contained to Cybersecurity, Efficiency, Experience, Flexibility, Resilience and Sustainability.

Specific offerings within the Marketplace termed X, are following the design principles of interoperability, flexibility, openness and as-a-service completely, are initially Building X and a Grid X suite. These are offering a modular, fully cloud-based open software suite as available. Integrating the internet of things (IIoT) solutions across industries will emerge under Industrial Operations X, which brings sensors to the edge, to the cloud and is designed for a comprehensive IT/ OT integration of knowledge and capabilities.

Finally, I return to why Siemens has launched Siemens Xcelerator- the need for accelerating the digital transformation.

Presently, it is claimed that 70% of digital transformations fail. Many projects are often caught in pilot purgatory, and the realization of the digital transformation needs a radical ramping up, a step-change in approach.

This is the rationale for Siemens to launch their Xcelerator digital business platform.

The need is for a radically new approach. The ones that have taken on digital transformation have found it complex and demanding. It challenges much, can upend the business entirely, and that becomes a risk to undertake. Yet, these digital transformations have been undertaken often in isolation or with limited partners; this needs changing.

Siemens has signalled a new journey in a world that seems in a continuous state of flux and needs a more connected ecosystem, portfolio agility and robust, growing Marketplace for all to shop based on the Xcelerator Digital Business Platform (Website here) that will enable a greater digital transformation and value creation for customers of all sizes in the industry, buildings, grids and mobility sectors.

Disclaimer: This article is published in partnership with Siemens. Siemens is paying for my engagement, not for promotional purposes. Opinions are my own

The post Many moving parts to Siemens Xcelerator. Part one – what it is? first appeared on Your Ecosystem Design Hub.

The power of the Siemens industrial partner ecosystem is in having partners combining their domain expertise, with the Digital Enterprise portfolio of Siemens to solve real-world challenges and create value for customers.

Building a powerful industrial partner ecosystem

How do you set about building an open, inclusive ecosystem that enables global knowledge sharing and open collaboration?

A fascinating session held at Hannover Messe 2022 by Siemens was entitled “Master digital transformation and accelerate business value through a powerful industrial Partner Ecosystem”, bringing together representatives of a solution group, moving towards 2,000 solution partners, that work within the platform provided by Siemens.

The concept provides an ecosystem approach that combines different partner expertise to tackle and support the digital transformation needed to break down silos and think well beyond the walls of the present customers’ current configuration within their factories to turn them into a Digital Enterprise.

The forum’s design is an open, highly collaborative way to solve problems, resolve challenges and build out a customer’s environment to benefit from the connected solutions that technology enablement brings.

The concept is to build on what each partner has already gained from their experience and expertise, delivered to their customers, to share and provide services and technology solutions to different Siemens customers that bring them higher business value and impact.

To read more on this review visit

ingenuity.siemens.com • 1 min read

Conclusion

Disclaimer: This article is published in partnership with Siemens. Siemens is paying for my engagement, not for promotional purposes. Opinions are my own

The post Siemens is building a powerful industrial partner ecosystem first appeared on Your Ecosystem Design Hub.

Today, 29th June 2022, Siemens launched Siemens Xcelerator across its entire portfolio to accelerate digital transformation and value creation for customers of all sizes in industry, buildings, grids and mobility. The business platform makes digital transformation easier, faster and scalable.

Xcelerator is an open digital business platform, that will enable hardware, software and digital services from across all of Siemen’s portfolios and also will bring in certified third parties, to provide a growing ecosystem of partners, provide an evolving marketplace to accelerate the digital transformation and provide interactions and transactions between customers, partners and developers. The really big story is the moving toward an Industrial Metaverse through the power of this Xcelerator platform and its future potential in a new exciting partnership with NVIDIA.

This is a step-by-step transformational journey

Roland Busch, President and CEO of Siemens AG remarked Xcelerator “is the logical next step in the implementation of our digitalization strategy to enable even faster innovation and value creation. Siemens Xcelerator brings the power of our focused technology company together with a thriving ecosystem of technology partners. We are joining together to simplify digital transformation so that customers of all sizes can benefit at speed and scale.”

He went on to state “Siemens Xcelerator will make it easier than ever before for companies to navigate digital transformation – faster and at scale. By combining the real and the digital worlds across operational and information technology, we empower customers and partners to boost productivity, competitiveness and scale up innovations.”

“Our leading portfolio is transformed towards more open applications, with more cloud-based and as-a-service solutions and IoT-enabled hardware that can be constantly upgraded. At the same time, the collaboration will reach a new level with a growing ecosystem of partners.”

Siemens generated Euro 62.3 billion in revenue in fiscal 2021, employing around 303,000 employees worldwide that provides solutions to more resource-efficient factories, resilient supply chains, and smarter buildings and grids, to cleaner and more comfortable transportation as well as advanced healthcare. Siemens states very clearly it creates technology with purpose, adding real value for customers.

What Siemens Xcelerator comprises and will move towards achieving

Xcelerator is a curated portfolio, a growing ecosystem and an evolving marketplace that will build out over the coming months and years. The complexity of this transformation is huge. and will be taken step by step.

It is a very big deal with the commitment of “Siemens will transform its entire portfolio of hardware and software to become modular, cloud-connected and built on standard application programming interfaces (APIs). The highest standards and value for all parties will be ensured by strong technical and commercial governance principles. Siemens and third-party offerings will adhere to the design principles of interoperability, flexibility, openness and as-a-service”

In my view, to take their “entire leading portfolio and transform it towards more open applications, with more cloud-based and as-a-service solutions and IoT-enabled hardware that can be constantly upgraded. At the same time, the collaboration will reach a new level with a growing ecosystem of partners.” is a massive undertaking when you adhere to these design principles of offering interoperability, flexibility, openness and as-a-service.

The launch event was chock full of examples, of industrial leaders from Science & Technology, Space Exploration, Transport, Vehicles, and Grid providers all giving their view of a future, a future of collaborations

Please visit the launch site here where it provides much of the different launch material from today’s event.

The need to replicate and learn

A real message was the ambition through Xcelerator is to replicate and learn, to gain from one set of experiences and challenges, in one industry, or a building or grid solution and scale that out, not so much a plug and play but a plug & run. The ability to optimise the end-to-end system value.

During the launch event, three parts of the transformation being undertaken were additionally announced.

• Launch of new Building X end-to-end smart building Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) suite
  • Planned acquisition of Brightly Software will accelerate growth in digital buildings complementing Siemens’ smart building portfolio
  • Partner ecosystem grows through industrial metaverse partnership with NVIDIA for physics-based, immersive digital twin development

New SaaS launch with Building X kicking this off

Siemens Smart Infrastructure has launched Building X, a new smart building suite that is open, interoperable and fully cloud-based. The suite is the first next-generation offering built on the design principles of Siemens Xcelerator, an open digital business platform launched today to accelerate digital transformation and value creation across industry, transportation, grids and buildings. The “X” stands for delivering these design principles of offering interoperability, flexibility, openness and as-a-service.

Explaining Building X

Building X addresses the challenges of various stakeholders, including building users, investors, real estate companies and facility managers. It acts as a single source of truth to eliminate complexity and supports net-zero targets. Stakeholders can now digitize and use their building data from various sources, disciplines and systems on one single platform, Building X.

This enables a seamless user experience and the integration of their existing software and ecosystem, including third-party applications, through vendor-agnostic connectivity and open application programming interfaces (APIs). The suite offers modular, AI-enabled applications, and built-in cyber security. It also facilitates co-creation with customers and partners to address their challenges faster, thanks to the openness and cloud technology, which means digital transformation can be achieved easier, faster and at scale.

* I will pick up on this in a separate post as it brings to life the modular, scalable, open building suite that is designed to seamlessly integrate building systems to eliminate current complexity and enables the combination of sustainability goals and accelerating solutions to reach net-zero buildings.

Secondly, to build out Building X on Monday, June 27, 2022, Siemens announced the agreement to purchase Brightly Software, a leading U.S.-based asset and maintenance management software company. The acquisition will add Brightly‘s well-established capabilities across key sectors to Siemens’ digital and software know-how in buildings. It will be an additional core element of the Siemens Xcelerator for Buildings portfolio.

Thirdly a partnership announcement that continues to build out the Ecosystem network of Siemens with the announcement that with NVIDIA the plan is for a new era of immersive digital twin technology

Siemens will be making a considerable expansion to its Ecosystem of partners. It is committing significantly to joining forces and growing a strong partner ecosystem, building on existing strategic partnerships including Accenture, Atos, AWS, Bentley, Microsoft and SAP. The intention is to expand the partner ecosystem with multiple small, medium and large companies to solve problems by finding the right partnership solutions.

NVIDIA is the first major partnership agreement under the Siemens Xcelerator umbrella. The two companies today announced an expansion of their partnership to enable the industrial metaverse and increase the use of AI-driven digital twin technology that will help bring industrial automation to a new level. As the first step in this collaboration, the companies plan to connect Siemens Xcelerator, the open digital business platform and NVIDIA Omniverse, a platform for 3D design and collaboration. This will enable an industrial metaverse with physics-based digital models from Siemens and AI-enabled, physically accurate, real-time simulation from NVIDIA where companies make decisions faster and with increased confidence.

Here the ambition of building out the Industrial Metaverse begins to come to life. The power of having a digital twin to enable the real and virtual worlds to come together, to be simulated, to be tested, and designed before the actual real world. The exciting partnership offers a significant change to how the digital transformation will travel.

Picking up in the press release and within the event solutions for IIoT are building at a pace equally

A further part of the event mentions that Siemens also plans to integrate its industrial internet of things (IIoT) solutions for industry as Industrial Operations X, which brings together solutions and applications from the sensor to edge to cloud, IoT as-a-service and low code development capabilities, as well as a wide range of ready-to-use-apps. This will enable the fusion of data from the real world of automation with the digital world of information technology, enriched by Siemens’ comprehensive vertical IT/ OT integration knowledge and capabilities.

The key here, like all that Xcelerator is planning to do, finding solutions with partners that set about breaking down data silos and customer challenges to help companies to increase their performance, productivity, flexibility and sustainability. That alone is not a small deal it is the ability to enable faster innovation and value creation, to transform and why Xcelerator becomes the connector and power to enable the realization of Siemens being a focused technology company together in a thriving ecosystem of technology partners.

The beginning of a very different Siemens dawned today

The outcome for me is that today’s event begins the transformation of a very different business model for Siemens, one that moves from selling products to selling solutions and outcomes that the customer wants. If they want a box, product, or machine, then fine but if they want a complete solution then Siemens and its partners can find and offer the solution.

I want to absorb the multiple points of what was present here, it was arguable massive in ambition but so is the digital transition. Siemens has put a clear stake in the ground in transforming themselves and providing this Xcelerator platform that brings their portfolio (and others) around a growing Ecosystem and providing a growing marketplace of solutions, not products, to the challenges of making a step change within the industrial digital transformation

Please visit the Siemens site for all the different press releases relating to today’s event and this link to the specific launch page.

Disclaimer: This article is published in partnership with Siemens. Siemens is paying for my engagement, not for promotional purposes. Opinions are my own

The post Siemens launches Xcelerator for navigating the digital transformation first appeared on Your Ecosystem Design Hub.

So, what makes industries more sustainable, more responsive and adaptive? How can we build a sustainable industrial capability?

We have entered a far more volatile set of market conditions. Industrial companies are searching for ways to accelerate their digital transformation to keep up with changing demands, managing the increasing complexity and reacting to supply chain challenges.

We are facing up to some of the most significant challenges of our time. Dealing with climate change, we urgently need to rapidly decarbonize in a world where the global industrial sector accounts for 20-30% of global carbon emissions and 1/3 of global energy use.

The imperative is transforming industry towards a greater need to build out a sustainable future as critical to tackling decarbonization in highly collaborative ways through the combination of technology and human ingenuity.

Today, there is a need to manage in a more highly connected, intelligent way through AI and machine learning and by connecting machines into a networked environment to harness the necessary data and intelligence to make more insightful decisions.

Energy efficiency and the need to focus on the aim to recycle are part of our solutions to change today’s environment. As we face a world of limited resources, the circular economy/resource efficiency needs a significant shift to promoting the reuse of materials.

So, what makes industries more sustainable, more responsive and adaptive? How can we build a sustainable industrial capability?

It is only genuinely digital enterprises that are open and prepared to work together in collaborative ecosystems that will be able to gain the flexibility, adaptiveness and capabilities, needing to work with fewer resources, more efficiently, faster and move towards a lower energy consumption that can move towards the required ambitions of becoming net-zero.

Sustainability is becoming central to making any significant transition. Siemens is focusing on being a sustainable industrial company in what it does itself in its solution offerings and with and for its partners and customers. A large part of achieving sustainability comes from applying targeted technologies.

Siemens AG is spending significant time providing sustainable innovations to drive this change. It is simply not just speeding up and scaling the available technology. It recognizes this has to be done in a radically different environment, in ecosystems working together to be the essential gamechanger to meeting and resolving these challenges.

Collaborating in ecosystems becomes critical to transitioning to a more sustainable industrial sector.

Siemens is empowering the industry through sustainable industrial innovation by providing technology designs that produce sustainable solutions.

Siemens is offering a sustainable digital enterprise portfolio, giving significant benefits of reducing cost and waste, managing business variability, and focusing on operational efficiency and optimization.

Equally, the potential for new business model innovation in the flexibility of design, re-engineering for reducing waste, recycling and recovery and testing through simulation, generative, and scenario investigations through applying their technology and software solutions.

 The power of connecting the real world with the digital world

Digitalization across the whole life cycle becomes critical when 80% of a product’s impact is determined at the design stage. Innovating more energy-efficient products can extend the life and be designed for reuse with a digital twin. Combining hardware and software can accelerate the transformation to a more sustainable future.

Recently at Hannover Messe 2022, Siemens showcased their portfolio through an e-mobility solution that combines the digital and physical worlds where design can be optimized and operations decarbonized, This showcase demonstrated the value of combining the digital and physical by using the digital twins for both product and production that efficiencies, optimization, simulation and the environmental footprint through a circular economy approach in design and material usage could all be addressed and proven.

Showcasing the SimRod- the fun electric roadster

In a panel discussion at Hannover Messe 2022 entitled “Transforming industries: Driving sustainability and profitability along the value chain” with Martin Kyburz, the CEO of Kyburz, Switzerland, Eryn Devola, the Head of Sustainability, Siemens Digital Industries, and Katrien Wyckaert, VP Strategy & Innovation, Simcenter Siemens Digital Industries Software they discussed challenges and solutions of the sustaining transformation by taking a deep dive into e-mobility by using the showcase “SimRod” as a technology carrier.

The SimRod is a roadworthy electric sports car that clearly demonstrates how Siemens is supporting and empowering the industry to design and produce sustainable products that are ecological in thinking and offer the lifecycle reuse potential which is increasingly expected today by the final customers.

The SimRod is a roadworthy all-electric sports car showing the result of the close collaboration with Siemens and Kyburz. This partnership between the two provided an exciting, fun, safe and compact all-electric car. A car designed to offer a good range of distance due to its design as lightweight design and delivering a quality of life return, and most importantly, specifically designed to be recycled

The Siemens solutions provided the empowering conditions to design and produce a sustainable product. The SimRod had its train, chassis, suspension, battery housing and design, and e-drive systems first simulated in the digital world, before creating any physical prototypes.

This digital design and simulation work allowed for a complete overview to optimize the design and led to identifying where additive solutions can help reduce cost and weight. Finally, harnessing all the data within this digital world gathered in digital design and testing enables a more efficient physical optimization of the car and the production design in producing a car optimized in its final configuration.

Transforming Industry for a Sustainable Future.

Applying Siemens technologies, the solutions can transform automotive products. Using solutions ranging from digital twins and additive manufacturing to automatic guided vehicles – achieving ergonomic designs in factory and production layouts providing more efficient and sustainable solutions by optimizing this in a simulated environment.

Applying this sustainable digital enterprise approach to both the product and production cycle enabled a more explicit ability to manage and engineer for the circular economy.

This showcase provided a significant proof of reference and validation in the design and simulation of the entire Siemens portfolio and strength with a single technology carrier- the SimRod providing what the unique combination of real & digital worlds do to become the catalyst for a Digital Enterprise that drives and integrates sustainability. The SimRod provided the collaboration capabilities by demonstrating technology and engaging suppliers, partners and the people involved in the design and production process.

Drawn from the Siemens Digital Enterprise portfolio was the application of the power of the Digital Twin, with the ability to accelerate product design and development, applying software and systems engineering. This approach allowed for building on Siemens approaches to Smart Manufacturing, Autonomous Production, Additive Manufacturing, IoT & Analytics, Sustainable & Flexible Production, offering Cyber Security, Energy Data Optimization, Product Carbon Footprint management with SiGREEN, and providing advice through Siemens Digital Services.

Siemens is a highly focused technology company that offers solutions ready for sustainability to meet industry challenges. Siemens fully supports the sustainable industrial innovation pathway alongside its customers with its solutions in highly collaborative environments. With the combination of digitalization, automation and the intelligent use of data, customers are equally having the opportunity of becoming Digital Enterprises, enabling them to become more resource-efficient, move towards decarbonizing and apply sustainable solutions to stimulate the circular economy

Disclaimer: This article is published in partnership with Siemens. Siemens is paying for my engagement, not for promotional purposes. Opinions are my own.

The post Building the sustainable industrial innovation pathway first appeared on Your Ecosystem Design Hub.

Today’s challenge is to build the organizational capacities to be different, sustained and accelerate the critical aspect that innovation, ingenuity and creativity can provide and make sure they are equipped for supporting lasting, sustainable growth that comes from a purposefully designed business ecosystem.

Applying ecosystem thinking offers you the collaborative ability to extend beyond more traditional channels of delivery, often just restricted to only utilizing your existing infrastructure, sales channels and networks of partners. Building a more open business ecosystem allows you to search and build on others’ specialization into that “greater” innovation potential.

Today to set about and build a business ecosystem, the significant application and the use of technology, the cloud and a diverse set of collaborations will increasingly become the mainstream for innovation inputs, accelerants, and the delivery of value.

We need to experiment openly, open ourselves up to external advice, and become involved in different offerings to learn and build our understanding of how these can work (for us and others). Platforms, strategic partnerships, and new business models will all be on the agenda of any serious global organization.

To learn to deliver valuable innovation through an ecosystem-designed approach requires a radically different innovation system of management, built around adapting and changing our thinking towards ecosystems by design.

Innovation will move from being based on incremental innovation, all designed in-house, single entity outcomes, into bold, collaborative offerings, cutting across today’s established industry boundaries and pushing out across different innovation frontiers.

There is a need to encourage a more radical innovation approach to achieve this shift in innovation. This new level of innovation capability requires participating on various platforms and extracting in different ways across multiple ecosystems to meet your aims and align these with others.

Radical innovation calls for a more deliberate design, constantly adapting, adjusting and applying agile thinking in highly collaborative open ways. It will demand a very different set of disciplines, processes, and design. This will open up the whole need to re-evaluate the governance, the risk management and the resources needed to operate in this new innovating world.

Broader collaborations will become central for future organizations to find ways to cooperate, network and build relationships that recognize the partnership value to achieve a sustainable, future business that offers impact and connected design for customers to value that meets their changing needs.

Aligning partners on a platform needs-basis is very different from aligning them to just one organization’s needs. In the past, we adapted to meet that specific requirement of that one dominant organization as they controlled the process.

Today you can argue differently why what you see as needed is not the best and maybe different than first envisaged, and it is better and evolutionary but demands more change and disruption internally.

Ecosystem design allows for more breakthrough innovation, provides a greater challenge to the existing status quo, and often takes organizations out of their comfort zones.

There is so much to explore and build around innovation ecosystem design.

Innovation in a highly collaborative world is exciting to explore, learn and attempt to translate into the future innovation designs we need, built on highly collaborative concepts.

• Thinking about ecosystems does allow us to go out of our normal scope of invention, innovation and being creative. The organization that envisages a changing world needs to organize around ecosystems to deliver on that vision to gain the leading influencer’s position.
• Making Sustainability central to our future innovation capability building will be through adopting a new open ecosystem approach. The future of collaborations can increasingly share previously idle or under-utilized assets; it can extend the life and extract idle knowledge often locked in one organization.
• Ecosystems built around specific platform designs are the future of innovation that takes designs and solutions into a new realm of opportunity, built on collaborative engagement and joint missions. As we learn, we adapt, and as we share, we grow.
• Ecosystems require increased interactions within the community and need more tightly controlled activities to gain the synergies and effects of working within any networked system. Relationship management needs to keep focusing on enhancing, driving innovation and knowing how to adapt this within the whole concept—no easy task.
• Ecosystems that produce new business models rely on a large capacity for agile thinking within the participating organizations. Internal capabilities and competencies get highly stretched by the new dynamics; you need a strong ecosystem orchestrator to manage these challenges and many cultural biases that can blind existing lines of sight.
• Ecosystem innovation today is more about managing beyond the immediate known found within one organization’s limited focus of the world. The race is to gain an advantage and often try to dominate and influence the future direction a market will take.
• This new ecosystem thinking requires a broader perspective and a greater diversity of thought by tapping into varying levels of specialized expertise. For innovation, you need to extend your view, push the boundaries and make sure you can connect all the parts for it to grow and develop.

Advancing our innovation activity is the exciting part of designing a new business ecosystem. It is building and learning, evolving a design of an ecosystem that has the potential to ‘create’ something different and transform a germ of an idea into something living, breathing and valued, a set of tangible innovative outcomes.

As we think about ecosystems, we need to think differently.

Are you exploring this innovation dynamic of platforms and ecosystems yet? It is even more dramatic in change than moving from closed to open innovation; it will challenge how we undertake business.

The business will need to be radically redesigned, based on a new organizational architecture, to embrace a more open, collaborative environment where dependency lies in partnerships outside your existing organization. You need to get into a position to experiment, test, exploit and explore in limited ways to learn and adapt.

The post Designing a new business ecosystem for greater innovation first appeared on Your Ecosystem Design Hub.

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.

Sustainability is reshaping the core of business in four ways.

If the decision is made to become more focused on “being sustainable”, drastic shifts in direction will undoubtedly occur. The shift from that fear of being disrupted due to the digital transformation is being replaced by the need to build a sustainable company built on increasing insight and connected understanding, seeking and exploring, experimenting and confirming a new value equation.

The shift into a more future-focused position where sustainability becomes core will require a dedicated, focused, systematic need to assess the portfolio and the operating conditions. This goes way beyond the present “where to play and how to win”; this becomes as much for the long game as managing the short term.

We need to often completely rethink the present business model. I would argue all of today’s business models are in urgent need to be redesigned around ecosystem thinking and designs that are open, highly collaborative and responsive but equally geared to being sustainable for the long run.

I suggest, to start, four focal points to consider

The focus is on undertaking and shaping a new core through four focus points for sustainability;

1) redefining a new set of strategic choices,

2) evaluating both product and operation reinvention to reflect this strategic design,

3) re-evaluating your innovative partnerships within a new sustainability ecosystem design and finally

4) recognizing the length of time it will realistically take to achieve more sustainable value creation and the shift of all your resources to make this change.

If you don’t have the appetite to undergo this then recognize your business is already facing decline and will have less relevancy and customer identification and you will progressively be “frozen out” of a world of collaborators and relationships building a very different, more complex set of solutions to provide lasting value and impact.

Redefining new directions and strategic choices

To embrace sustainability, you embrace a new set of principles of governance that bring the planet, people and prosperity far more into the thinking.

What would that mean in the magnitude of change? How do you assess if your current business portfolio is sustainability proof of not just what is required or needed for today but also in the future? Different scenario thinking needs a constant mindset and evaluation.

The argument is to envision today going forward and the future working back for framing the different scenarios.

Each of these different approaches to framing future challenges requires different thinking. The two perspectives, predicting forward, working back, give insights into alternative positions and build out required milestones for the next 5,10, and 20 years can have very different outcomes.

The annual business plan has become increasingly adaptive to meet today’s operating conditions, this is not the point of future stakeholder value, it is the plan, openness and path you are taking to achieve a more sustainable business.

For thinking about sustainability pathways you will be in need of having different scenario plans and options in pursuit of your goals. Agility and adaptiveness will be key as essential for the business to manage this pathway, navigating increased uncertainty, challenge and complexity and becoming the dynamic strategic directional document for moving towards a sustainable future.

• I have built out in this link the thinking about sustainability from more of the innovation perspective here.

The challenge of reinvention and recycling.

Not just sustainability forces a sharper need for strategic choices but the ability to undertake the product reinvention. A reinvention that concerns itself with reducing waste, minimizing carbon emissions, valuing the full life cycle and the ability to show the increasingly important end-of-life part of the lifecycle model.

Any products need to have a clear understanding of all their stages of a product lifecycle for the clarity of sustainability, knowing your carbon footprint across all the stages from raw material to final delivery to customers and beyond is essential.

For instance, a clarification that the materials were sourced from green energy or sustainable sources to build, deliver and dispose of the product in this new truly sustainable economy approach is needed and will be valued as critical in future judgements.

Having a circular model of production and consumption, which involves sharing, leasing, reusing, repairing, refurbishing and recycling existing materials and products as long as possible is becoming critical

Operations have been progressively transformed due to digital advances. Connecting plants, devices, and machines have revolutionized the environment. Environmental standards, the treatment of employees, suppliers and the community where plants are situated all need reassessment.

Asking the four essential points of governance principles, supporting the planet’s health, being concerned for people and providing prosperity to those involved needs to be captured and translated within any sustainable plan.

Driving behavior change towards a sustainable culture is paramount.

The nature of behavior changes in collaborations, in working conditions, in health and safety concerns. The need for ongoing social and environmental risk screening becomes central to monitor and report upon constantly. How are you driving down power consumption, achieving net-positive impacts, and changing behaviors?

Strengthening and invigorating innovation partnerships.

The whole urgency of collaborating has grown and given the importance of managing through ecosystems and platforms where parties can manage and share. Developing the capabilities and competencies to address sustainability issues needs a new open, collaborative mindset.  The push for establishing robust sustainability ecosystems will be relevant within the new core to manage the business differently.

To embrace sustainability requires a no-holds-barred assessment of the present business and what is required in resources, shifts in strategic design and stakeholder dialogue. The journey does need a robust level of quantifying the disruption, for not just better-informed decisions, based on fact-based our best assumptions. Any journey like this needs to commit to moving forward, learning, pivoting where needed, recognizing what and why that has been seen and understood, and re-affirming the moving forward again in approaches.

The human challenge and seeing capital in broader senses

To become aware of sustainability at the core of business design, it needs developing groups of sustainability talent, more mission-driven, not just commercially focused. The importance of natural capital and social capital comes “alongside” financial considerations.

Sustainability is critically important. It needs this ecosystem and future innovating perspective as it is a combined effort, the gathering point that we all need to relate to and focus upon.

Firstly, the bigger picture of what you need to achieve must always be factored in to protect and support; firstly, appreciating natures capital, and secondly, constantly paying attention to our actions on the climate and decarbonization, I outlined some initial thoughts in this recent post, “Looking beyond ESG”.

Secondly, we need to achieve far better consistency in Sustainability reporting as many of the reports you work through are attractively presented but lack the real depth I feel this reporting needs. Thankfully there is a significant move towards a comprehensive corporate reporting system that integrates sustainability reporting with mainstream financial disclosures. I discuss this in a post that focuses on a business, building “Understanding Value Creation”.

Be careful of your core metrics- they liberate or constrain.

Shed your past mindset on measurements. Sustainability is not determining core metrics and disclosures that become set in stone. They can keep you strapped in a straight jacket of reinforcing metrics and not fully appreciating the materiality needed, searching for the information and insights that are important, relevant and /or critical to long-term value creation.

We need to recognize that “materiality” is a dynamic concept, meaning issues considered relevant to one aspect of focus can rapidly shift to different materiality.

Finally, embracing the world of intersections.

Realistically to achieve more sustainable value creation and the shift of all your resources to make this change.

I will come back to this more in future posts.

Sustainable value creation (the rationale for taking this journey) lies at the intersection of social and corporate value. That suggests that sustainability needs to be the new growth core; it embraces sustainability as a new direction of travel.

Are you gearing up for this sustainable journey and recognizing what it all means?

The post Gearing up for sustainability in business is becoming core first appeared on Your Ecosystem Design Hub.

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.

To achieve impact, value and growth need a uniquely designed ecosystem of collaborators, all searching for real competitive advantage that a customer values.

Speed and scale have become essential but so many of our organizations are caught in a legacy of past product or solution design that holds them back.

Yet if you ask the customer so many of today’s solutions are not what they really want, they want novelty, originality and a real freshness in solutions that continually evolve and solve their changing problems. Customers have become more demanding and we need to respond in really different, imaginative and collaborative ways.

We need to explore different ways to design and capitalize on the ecosystem we have around us. Connecting intelligence and diverse insights focused on unravelling complexity, combining different experiences and knowledge to seek out market and product potential and understanding. This calls for a diversity of opinions and insights, drawn from a greater network and relationship effect.

Today we can think and react differently. We have the means to rapidly accelerate, explore and validate solutions and this is through the combined effect of technology and people, engaging and exchanging thoughts, experiences and ideas.

The new combination effect

The combination effect comes from the ability to bring ecosystems, platforms, marketplaces and novel portfolios together, to form the need of today; building the digital enterprise, irrespective of what product or service business you are in. We need to build a connected world that embraces this different thinking.

We need to leverage not just technology through greater, open collaborations and networks, we need to take the stacks provided in technology design and we need to build out more comprehensive portfolios of solutions.

Moving to an adaptable block design

We are actually moving from the vertical stacks as the focus, to a block system in design, that can be moved, added to or changed, more vertical and horizontal to fit exact needs, and then interchangeable and adaptable for changing conditions and opportunities. Moving from stacks to blocks is a topic I will come back to in a future post.

So why do ecosystems, platforms, and marketplaces that give access to broader portfolio options, become recognized as essential, as the new organization operating design?

We do need to ground any platform discussion and design into the ecosystems they seek to enable.  We need to feed marketplaces and emerging portfolios with the conversations and the combination of people and technology drawn from our ecosystem generation and our platform enablement.

Business is shifting from vertical to horizontal.

A business today can’t stay locked into one business model, it has to evolve, and it has to adapt quickly. If you are locked into one vertical design of a business model and you have built your organization design and its technology solution stack specifically to that you are potentially hopelessly caught out today.

Staying locked into this static design has huge implications for how you can respond and adapt.

So many organizations stay locked into this one, repeating model, as it has been highly effective and delivered the economy of scale we were taught at business schools as essential to achieving maximising productivity and profit.

Yet when this comes under attack it proves the straight jacket. Management is so locked into this one model of operating, that it chooses to ignore the shifts taking place and presses on regardless, often until it is too late and they are faced with a more dramatic decline in sales, appeal and positioning.

For many business organizations that offer one product or a series of products that are specific to a given need then adopting an ecosystem, platforms and marketplace approach might seem to have less relevance perhaps but I firmly believe can’t be ignored.

Producing a given widget or a variety of these as essential materials to others needs to place an increasing focus on productivity and efficiencies.

Yet they need Industrial IoT solutions in connecting machines, supply chains, and customers as they emphasise they are optimizing and automating but this needs a connected ecosystem of design equally, likely on a cloud-based platform.

The more dynamic, ever-changing market needs fresh solutions

It is radically different for the organization that relies on new products and has a changing product lifecycle management (PLM) where there is increasing complexity, time, cost and risk associated with changing market needs as products change in design, content or fabrication.

Speed, scale, and solving complexity are leading to a new competitive advantage to respond to constantly changing customer needs.

In markets that are evolving and constantly changing, the reliance on a variety of engineering disciplines, designing, research and development, on seeking out new application development capabilities, all become essential to optimize and harmonize.

Design, Formulation, Production and Utilization flows have an increasing need to be fully leveraged. Fundamental to this leveraging need is to rethink the way our technology will bring value to this speed, scale and complexity being faced. The solutions need to be more accessible, more flexibly and more adapting in expanding or contracting to meet shifting needs.

This is where “the combination effect” of building out in ecosystem design, on platforms the portfolio and tapping into the needs of marketplace offering becomes the future of organization design.

It is within these needs we need to find substantial new ways of deploying technology that brings the ecosystem design together.

To shift our dynamics we need the combination effect

So we need to recognize that today, business organization design needs to be open, taking a modern ecosystem approach and thinking, and then connecting up. through leveraging people and technology.

As products and services are more complex, organizations need to seek out new connections both within and beyond their own organization to leverage, knowledge, diversity, technology, material research and scientific access and garner the relevant experience this can bring.

Today we need to offer customers solutions that are unique, novel and provide increased value to what is currently available.

This providing of clear differences is becoming critical for gaining a competitive advantage and it is applying technology  with people collaborating that leverages this whole new ecosystem design thinking.

Ecosystem thinking and designs, by applying a radical rethinking to a business based on adopting an open platform technology approach that builds out through marketplace connectivity can enable an ever-expanding range of options in portfolio choices and market attraction.

As ecosystem thinking emerges, and platforms proliferate we enter a different world of cutting across existing market definitions and entering a boundary-less one, full of collaborating scenarios, options and market expanding opportunities.

Welcome to ecosystem thinking and design.

The post The combination effect of ecosystems, platforms, marketplaces and portfolios first appeared on Your Ecosystem Design Hub.