All around us, we are faced with new challenges and growing complexity.

We seem caught up in more wicked problems that require a profound shift relating to innovation. Increasingly, we are also witnessing growing dissatisfaction with the impact that innovation has today to overcome customer needs and provide more sustained growth, returns, market and customer impact.

One of the implications of this growing recognition is that innovation today rarely succeeds in isolation, staying within the four walls of one organization. Solutions required are becoming highly dependent on a more dependent type of complementary innovation: open, collaborative, sharing, and exchanging collectively around a given concept to take it to market. This requires business ecosystem thinking and design.

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 a significant part. It is by the very nature of the interacting 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, and offering the potential for the outcomes to be greater than the sum of the individual parts. 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. Already, major entities are recognizing the force of Ecosystems.

Multiple elements combine to drive change- do you recognize these?

• Businesses need to find new competitive battle zones as they exhaust the traditional ones.
• There are these higher risks of disruption happening today across all industry sectors.
• The scramble to scale and globalize increases the pressure for speed, adaptation, and new outlooks.
• Customers are more sophisticated and demanding, with expectations and empowerment rising.
• Customer experience is becoming more compelling and individualized, offering integrated experiences.
• Digital transformation, big data analysis and the ubiquity of information are changing the knowledge game.
• Industry lines and conventions are blurring and merging through the need for technology and overhaul.
• Power is shifting from single-entity offerings into broader entities collaborating through platform offerings built on solving more complex customer needs.
• The existing Business Model is increasingly under threat and shorter in its ‘shelf life.’
• Collaborative Needs are increasingly the basis for achieving sustained competitive advantage.
• The reality is that every innovation and company is now part of a broader, evolving ecosystem.
• Our futures are far more intertwined and dependent on others than ever before.
• Technology is driving us all at an unparalleled rate of change in most of what we do in our lives.
• The reinventing of competition rules has dramatically opened up through startups, venture capital, and global challenges, recognizing that the combined effect is beating the incumbent.
• We cannot navigate the future alone; we are becoming increasingly reliant and dependent on establishing partners and seeking out new, evolving solutions to our problems.
• Technology offers businesses greater access to intelligence and insights that can be translated into knowledge quickly, understood, connected, and scaled.
• There is a shift in the economic equation to collaboration, transparency and customer engagement.

These shifts are altering the business environment. Organizations must find solutions to overcome these, as these shifts increasingly make the environment highly complex and require a highly collaborative way of thinking. Ecosystem thinking is crucial to managing this growing complexity in radically connected ways.

Business Ecosystems are not new, yet 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 their expertise and knowledge and build collaborative ways of working and sharing insights to the challenges that contribute towards building of solutions together that begin to tackle the world of complexity. Firstly we need to recognize the different mindsets for different Ecosystem thinking.

We also need to recognize ecosystems accelerate learning for innovation.

The combination of ecosystem thinking and the use of platform technology solutions offers the potential result of integration and connection across different fields of expertise and knowledge domains. Information, concepts, and innovation flow from greater use of a diverse pool of sharper minds, available only in this broader network, offering independent as well as collective wisdom and thinking.

Ecosystems increasingly give access to more competent combined resources than one organization can bring to bear to offer different innovation values. The value of the community’s combined intelligence allows for greater value capture, discussion, and diversity of opinions to be pooled and shared, leading to new value creation.

Ecosystems have distinct challenges and implications that need thinking through

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 business ecosystems will play within your present and future business?

The ability to collaborate can allow each party to act differently on their strategies and business models as they can extend these ways beyond the ‘realm of one’. Leadership, vision, core capabilities, value creation, and capturing systems can scale way beyond the existing organizational model. Ecosystems can liberate, accelerate, and realize business options that can radically affect the organization. They can radically shift the core.

We believe the era of the innovation business ecosystem is upon us.