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.