My building blocks towards Ecosystem thinking

Building blocks towards Ecosystem thinking and designing

Part-way through 2022, I drew up a list of my focal points in researching, stimulating my thinking and finding different validation points on my Ecosystem thinking and design approaches. In early January this year, I took a stop, more a reflective period in these past months, to deepen down even further my knowledge of Ecosystem thinking and design. I aim to achieve, even advancing, Ecosystem understanding for those interested to learn and seeking advice through direct engagements.

My main focus on Ecosystems comes from the innovation perspective. How can we finally combine all the different parts of the Innovation system into one, fully connected up and achieve a far more open design where contributors, both inside and outside organizations, can contribute as it is the diversity of experience needed today to give fresh value and impact on complex and challenging issues, We need that discovery to commercialization fully connected up to be leveraged fully in all the diversity of contributions.

Innovation in its challenges and problems has become more complex and challenging, both in solutions offered and in working out all the connected parts to provide products or services that are superior to the existing ones. The need to provide that essential “dynamic” of having customer engagement in their data, a growing network of connected partners providing their input, their exploring and experimenting so the inventor can learn and seek to improve the product or service accordingly.

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Building the Innovation Ecosystem narrative

Building out the Innovation Ecosystem narrative

There needs to be a fundamental shift in how we manage innovation, which needs ecosystem thinking and design. Not only in thinking and design but in how we structure its architecture, one based on platforms, open apps, and a marketplace for selection appropriate for the innovation delivery intention. This needs to be in open, highly collaborative ecosystems.

We need a better conceptual framework to build, one based on knowledge-based intelligence and well-grounded, driven by dynamic and constant interactions, events and processes, so all involved can be engaged in building solutions that have fresh impact and value within the market space identified.

My mind map of the over-arching aims of a new innovation narrative is shown below.

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Disruption is the new constant; forget the Status Quo

credit Storyblocks.com

Our existing business organizations need to envisage a changing world full of disruption that calls for radical constant change. They need to be ready to meet different challenges that will be consistent, complex and highly challenging, require the ability to be highly adaptive, and need high levels of open collaboration.

Connected technology needs to be central to responding rapidly and enabling this more volatile world we are facing. To achieve this responsiveness, organizations need to organize around ecosystems and platform technology approaches. This approach provides the potential ability to deliver an understanding of constant change. One that recognizes it has to be part of a growing collaborating network to thrive in this highly connected, rapidly changing and challenging world.

We need to transform or be (totally) disrupted; this is where knowing your ecosystem and network comes in as the new thinking and design of how this needs to be constructed and understood.

How and where innovation fits will depend on this transforming effect.

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Dealing with growing complexity needs innovation ecosystem thinking and design

earth globe with googly eyes on gray background
Photo by Anna Shvets on Pexels.com

Much of business today is caught up in managing short-term change that is growing in complexity and challenges across the business world globally. There is growing leadership and employee fatigue in managing rolling crises and not being able to adequately focus on the longer term, have that space to renew and in enough time as ideally liked. Disruption has been a constant at all organisational levels to adapt and adjust to worldwide events totally out of that organization’s control.

Following the pandemic, it has been hard to regain consistency due to staffing discontinuities and displacements, sourcing of raw materials, especially from China, their intermittency in availability and the general disruption of world trade. The war in Ukraine has only added more short-term crises in switching fuels, sourcing difficulties, changing supply chain dynamics, and generally readjusting the business operations in Ukraine and Russia to highly constrained operations or the loss/withdrawal need required by sanctions.

So the challenges in the past year have been highly focused on supply chain disruptions, plugging gaps in technology solutions that can provide solutions that can offer higher flexible, agile and advanced planning and production environments. The continued needs to keep moving towards securing a more sustainable future that reflects the need to become carbon neutral; net zero has needed a far more agile and adaptive approach.

As well as encourages thinking that is building a more robust circular economy to offset the immediate shortages but builds out a waste reduction mentality and recycling approach.

Yet disruption is increasing; we are in a volatile world of constant change.

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The necessary Plumbing, Pipework and Pumps for the Industrial Metaverse

The stages of building out the Industrial Metaverse
The stages of building out the Industrial Metaverse taking a three-horizon approach

I had the pleasure of attending the Nvidia GTC22 event recently. Over four days, they did a good job of scrambling my brain. Take a look at some of the sessions that apply to you- amazing stuff.

I focused on the Industrial Metaverse and where it is going. It is only at the beginning of its journey, but the feast of predictions, future forecasting and bold, clear visions on this was impressive.

Jensen Huang, the NVIDIA CEO gave the keynote where he took us into that opening understanding and a closer look at the game-changing technologies that are helping us take on the world’s greatest challenges. I really had to break this nearly two-hour keynote into “bite-sized” segments to absorb all the releases, updates and the speed of development that NVIDIA are undertaking.

Rev Lebaredian, VP within the Omniverse group, gave us a clear view of how and where the Industrial Metaverse can head. NVIDIA Omniverse is the platform for future building.

The Omniverse platform is for creating and operating metaverse applications.

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Seeing innovation differently through ecosystem thinking and design

Thinking of innovation as an innovation ecosystem in design

We need to re-think innovation and provide a new level of innovation integration and optimization.

What we see increasingly is the need to change to a different thinking, one of what “innovation ecosystems.” can provide.

In designing these innovation ecosystems, we might have the potential answer to overcoming and giving innovation that chance to be more central to the core of the business. It might offer us the ability to connect much of the rich internal knowledge with that outside one, that other organizations and individuals can provide, in diversity, or thought or contribution.

I envisage an ecosystem of working upon like-minded goals and ambitions, by collaborating for delivering a new form of innovation value. Collaborating in ecosystem thinking and design I would suggest opens up significant potential and combinations, that provide added value and significant opportunity for improvement on the existing offerings.

Approaching innovation on a common, shared technology platform can significantly enhance the discovery, experimentation, exploring and exploiting diverse skills and expertise through to commercialization.

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A Statement of Ecosystem Intent – the CEO letter often missing

A Statement of Ecosystem Intent – the CEO letter that is often missing but highly essential to have as part of any ecosystem design thinking.

Ecosystems have become a really hot topic. The word “Ecosystem” is getting as much “air time” as the general use of the word “innovation” in business recently.

It generates buzz, it projects the impression you are looking to the future, managing your business in that progressive, outward way, that shareholders and your employees love to hear.

The shift taking place- Ecosystems are entering the lexicon of top management.

It does sound good to talk about “building our ecosystem” in every possible way. You need to ask though, has management actually sat down and defined the type of ecosystem it wants to design, participate in, or become part of? Or does this simply happen, a sort of drifting into, a grand experiment, not connecting all that is truly necessary for such a seismic move, stifling the real progressive sense?

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Making Transition through Innovation, Ecosystem and Sustainable Approaches

Today, we need to transition through ecosystem thinking and designs, as we recognize the future value and impact for businesses to grow, is through collaborations and co-creation. We need to have a new open architecture for undergoing this transformation.

Making Sustainability central to innovation capability building in a new ecosystem designed way connects the parts into the future design. Continue reading

Understanding Value Creation within Ecosystem Thinking

Value Creation is vital to know about. Where is it coming from? What is being put into place to nurture, develop and allow its creation to evolve and spread so that it can attract more understanding?

Within Ecosystem thinking, the more we open up our thinking and ideas, the more we can build from this. We attract others to work together and create new points of value that are mutually rewarding. That openness offers so much more value creation possibility, yet we don’t talk about it; we simply generalize it like a “buzz word.” We need to be explicit on our value creation capabilities.

When we begin applying our thinking to Ecosystem designs, knowing where and how your value creation is generated becomes vitally important.

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A case for change; thinking out the evolution of platforms and ecosystems

What we offer today needs a change in emphasis of thinking out the evolution of platforms, into ones that are designed for building out thriving business ecosystems for all to collaborate around and build together.

I argue today, we need to change our stories into ecosystem thinking ones.

We need to shift our platform rhetoric into a vastly different one, one based on building the Ecosystem story, well defined in its understanding that requires a very intense focus on what it means within Industry design and expected outcomes.

Over the past three or more years, I have been studying and researching platforms and ecosystems. I feel we are at an inflexion point of significant business change from embracing ecosystem principles in the business world.

The key message from my reflection was, at the time, two years ago, “we do need to change our story; it is simply not about platforms“. It is thinking for the design for ecosystems, into “ecosystem mobilization.

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