I can remember getting completely “hooked” on Business Ecosystems by a series from Deliottes and one specific report, introduced and coordinated by Eamonn Kelley, with many contributors including Kelly Machese, Anna Muoio, John Hagel, and Larry Keeley. It was called “Business ecosystems come of age” and maybe it did not change my life, but it gave it a clearer focus- innovation ecosystems. Take a read, it is well worth it, its value then, 2015 has only matured in my mind.

I was also looking at another great piece by Deloitte on tapping into the Silicon Valley innovation ecosystem under a report called “How to Innovate the Silicon Valley Way” that came out in 2016. Another great motivation for focusing on innovation ecosystems.

One question asked in the Silicon Valley piece was “Why should enterprises give up transactional approaches in favor of dynamic, ecosystem-led innovation?

Today I would reverse that question “Why would any company still be locked into transactional approaches only functioning on its own resources?”

Today the struggle is to deal with increasing complexity, undoing the “knot” of difficult challenges and these cannot be undone or solved without collaborations outside one organization’s walls. We need to push this even further and totally accept that the hardest but best collaborations come from being involved in cross-industry or sector innovation systems.

Rethinking how to undertake this shift from internal reliance and control and letting go to explore is really hard for any CEO used to managing those below him.

Today leading organizations are scrabbling to rethink their approaches to strategy, business models, and how to react and operate, let alone building different core capabilities to seek and find value-creation opportunities that dramatically increase shareholder value.

Co-creating has become essential to learn and deploy. This is where Ecosystem design and thinking become vital to understand and then apply.

Disruption is everywhere, all around us. Organizations are having to navigate through very different terrains and landscapes than they have ever experienced before.

The ability to really “let go” and embrace increasing uncertainty and design that into your everyday thinking and managing requires the full use of both human and technological ingenuity.

The fundamental dynamics of value creation have changed.

Reliance on collaborations across industries, alongside Government and Institutions, the increasing need for data insights and interpretation through both this human and digital application, combining AI, Machine Learning, and Human insights, need to combine across growing collaborative capabilities that are open and embracing all are ging this new dynamic potential for value creation..

The combination of digitalization and connectivity needs ecosystem appreciation. It is forming a rich network of diverse players, pulled down from all aspects, including suppliers, customers, designers, competitors, research, and institution involvement.

The role of the originator or spotter of new opportunities needs to take more open, fluid, and adaptive views to explore different goals and enable and orchestrate effective governance of partners who can buy into the vision, mission, and goals from their own and mutual perspectives. The mechanisms of collaboration need to be fully understood. I wrote a series about “understanding cross-sector innovation ecosystem collaborations” that gives a “decent enough” introduction to cross-industry or sector ecosystem innovation aspects. These need exploring further as they just scratch the “collaboration” surface.

The risk and the reward of operating within ecosystems need real understanding. It can drain quicker than it can displace the existing if you let it.

I wrote, “What value does an innovation ecosystem offer?” and “What makes the innovation ecosystem different?”

Let me state real, tangible differences that occur from adopting ecosystem thinking and design:

What do we gain if we connect up our innovation activity in an ecosystem-designed way?

We harness creativity and intelligence in broader networks. We learn to share and seek mutual value openly.

Let me list what I see as the benefits.

• Organizations influence each other; they build out the knowledge terrain.
• We further the ability to compete, collaborate, share, co-create, and co-evolve in new ways.
• We can evolve more rapidly and effectively together
• Ecosystems can attract more significant resources and exchange potential in their diverse attraction
• We focus on the need to build by evolving and catalyzing
• We move quicker to scale, in knowledge, research, experimentation, and piloting, more simultaneous
• We can service, source, and secure markets differently
• We rapidly move beyond the (limited) capacities of single organizations
• We achieve a collective ability to learn, adapt and evolve together from knowledge and understanding to create better opportunities for the new value that connects more of what we need.
• We can adapt to a rapidly changing world, being within a constantly adaptive ecosystem environment
• We liberate more potential by discovering new sources of insights and expertise.
• We can evolve enterprise capabilities and competencies more dynamically
• We can achieve a high level of utilization and build out critical capabilities.
• Ecosystems can be visualized and modeled to re-imagine different solutions, using the digital twin, for example, for capturing, sharing, and building through different expertise lenses.
• We build a complex network of interdependencies increasingly, gaining collective intelligence.
• Ecosystems can add diverse connections unable to be achieved without this open thinking,
• We can gain a real sense of gravity, of attention, and flow from levels of transparency.
• We can move towards scale, scope, and speed at higher rates.

How can we drive the necessary changes toward innovation ecosystems? They can deliver such a rich potential of new economic and social value. Present innovation designs are holding us back, now is the time to embrace end-to-end Innovation Ecosystems where technology enables.

There is a real power within innovation ecosystems for a better pathway to sustained growth and impact.

Collaborating, cross-sector or industry gives such a different set of dynamics to a business, what and how it offers value and solutions, it changes totally the innovation game. Are you making the change?