All around us, we are faced with new challenges and growing complexity.
We seem to be caught up in more wicked problems that require a profound shift relating to innovation. Increasingly, we are also seeing a growing dissatisfaction with the impact that innovation needs to provide in growth, returns, market and customer impact.
One of the implications is this growing recognition is that innovation within business today rarely succeeds in isolation, staying within the four walls of one organization. Solutions required are growing reliant on a more highly dependent type of complementary innovation, open, collaborative, sharing and exchanging collectively around a given concept to take it to market.
Staying within this isolation will significantly impact organizations’ innovation management design and approach; it will need to find ways to open it up, finding ways to co-create and collaborate across a diversity of parties for their “domain” experience and expertise.
Innovation and Business ecosystems are being established based on complementarity and highly collaborative platforms that fundamentally challenge the current way we manage. In the future, our work activities for our innovation activities are setting about our innovating of “doing things” in radically different and more connected ways.
The value of a modular portfolio of modular APIs, having standard interfaces and interoperable offerings in a Marketplace of choices, enables innovation activity to be integrated, adapted and combined in ways that work for the collaborators involved, perhaps combined each time differently.
These Ecosystems and Platforms have the potential to threaten to dismantle the way innovation is being managed today. Today’s innovation software is mostly independent modular designs, restricted in the knowledge gained to flow seamlessly across the organization without significant manual intervention and reentry. Due to this unmet need of clients, we require a radical adjustment in our approaches to achieve a far more collaborative one built on innovation ecosystem thinking and platform design.
Complexity is rising, and offering discrete products is on the wane as they often do not connect to the user’s or consumer’s (exact) requirements. Products need to be more connected and offer collaborative engagement.
Working in Ecosystems will change the nature of business activities.
Ecosystems will have the potential to expand capabilities and enable experiences beyond anything possible today in the present ‘disconnected’ world, where technology is not playing the significant part it can do.
It is by the very nature of the interaction and interdependence in relationships that is driving this need to participate in an interconnected system, one that is looking to create and allocate new business value, acting together, that offers the potential for the outcomes to be greater than the sum of the individual parts and it will be technology driven.
Recognizing the significant changes underway, let’s look at many parts of today’s environment that are coming together to create the conditions for a ‘perfect storm’ that we must navigate through.
Business Ecosystems are not new, but they hold tremendous promise for innovation.
Business Ecosystem thinking, although not new, is rapidly becoming the new organism to coalesce around to tackle growing complex challenges and a more demanding consumer. It has the mechanisms to encompass all necessary players to share and relate to the challenges and collectively work on solutions together, often in a growing world of complexity.
We also need to recognize ecosystems accelerate learning for innovation.
The combination of ecosystem thinking and the use of platforms offers the potential result of integration and connection across different fields of expertise and knowledge domains. It allows for greater use of a diverse pool of sharper minds, available only in this broader network. It offers independent and highly collaborative options that combine collective wisdom and thinking.
Ecosystems increasingly give access to more imaginative resources that more than one organization can bring to bear to offer different innovation values. This allows for greater value capture, leading to new value creation.
Ecosystems have distinct challenges and implications that need thinking through; this is where I can help.
How do you set about the necessary evaluation of proactively thinking through the implications for building the capabilities and capacities to determine the role innovation ecosystems will play within your present and future business? Where can you seek an independent assessment? Where are the risks, impact points, internal challenges and value potential gained by contemplating such a change?
In Summary
Technology and a far more open, collaborative set of innovation partnerships can increase innovation value by applying ecosystem and platform thinking. It can help increase opportunities to understand and build on sustaining and nourishing customer engagement in a constantly connected, permanently-on world we must manage.
We believe the era of the innovation business ecosystem is upon us.
