The Interdependence of Three Ecosystems of Business Design

Have you asked why business ecosystems are emerging as a real competitive force?

We all need to recognize that the world is changing. It is a highly connected one, built on some incredible technological advances. What is emerging as crystal clear, is that the single industry and one business-specific approach are seeing massive change, are being placed increasingly under threat of not even surviving. We require different business models to compete. Many companies are exploring the value of becoming involved in a business ecosystem that crosses a variety of industries to build new communities that have the capacity to transform existing environments.

In the future, we need to build new capital based on a greater collective thinking, that of ecosystem thinking.

It is finding uniqueness that becomes increasingly important and comes from new knowledge, innovation investigation, validation, and outcomes and delivered in business ecosystems that offer new customer value, it builds greater value into future value capital. The “combination effect” is greater than the ‘stand alone’ parts.

We are increasingly finding that Ecosystems and Platforms, formed around ideas that are often too complex to be developed by a single entity, are benefiting through collaborative endeavors and showing real growth promise.

Recognizing the interdependence of three ecosystems for business design.

I wrote a post “the Interconnected Parts of the Ecosystem” earlier this year, after a paper written by Katri Valkokari, a Research Manager at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland that caught my eye.

It is recognizing that these three parts actually do fuse into one, the final design required, that are coming together in making up an integrated ecosystem of their distinct parts to build better outcomes.

They require ‘interaction and interdependence’ so as to find ways to tackle more complex, challenging problems in collaborative ways.

It is recognizing that this is between different part od understanding, it is the interdependence of knowledge, innovation, and business on a common platform that gives a certain “synthesis” and greatly extends capital by offering increased value. One feeds into the other and has a greater reinforcing value loop by seeing this exchange between knowledge, innovation, and business, as ongoing learning, to search for better and new value together.

Each of these three ecosystems of design establishes a boundary of scope and feeds into each other constantly. It is the fact they combine ideas, skills, learning, fresh insights, leading to promising outcomes and creations. It is how they interact and add new value that gives this ‘combination effect’ such potential for us to consider in any future ecosystem design.

Linking the three interdependent ecosystems

To plug into achieving this ‘paradigm shift’ of collaborating within ecosystems that Business is required to manage, they will need to transform themselves.

The search is on for forming those unique ecosystems or set of ecosystems that can deliver on this ‘transformation’ going on in front of our eyes that works for us, to allow for more valuable product design to meet customer needs.

The call is requiring us to manage the effective use of knowledge in ecosystem constructs as insights and data rapidly increase.

One of the central drivers of the competitiveness of all organizations is their effective use of knowledge. It is the generation, acquisition, integration and application of (new) knowledge needs that managers are able to manage learning. Knowledge underpins innovation, it informs it, the more it has change as part of its makeup, the more it becomes complex to discover, the more we have of this real need to upgrade how we experience, experiment and absorb learning and this is increasingly outside our own organizations

Knowledge is a real significant dimension of innovation management and what is constantly feeding into it. Treating knowledge as an separate ecosystem needs to be certainly considered well in any broader ecosystem design.

Data insights are flowing faster than ever before. To manage these more effectively we must partner with others to extract the insights. We need to separate knowledge awareness and house this in a knowledge ecosystem to manage it specifically.

The Innovation Ecosystem and why Business Ecosystems need them

The significant transformation taking place around exploiting technology and digital management has made ecosystems and platforms a mainstream prospecting need, in most of our businesses today. We must engage in what all of this means and its business impact.

The search is seemingly on for finding greater value and that will increasingly coalesce around innovation ecosystems. I certainly believe the ecosystem approach will increasingly become the main value-producing stream for innovation delivery. Platforms, strategic partnerships, new business models all will be on the agenda of any serious global organization and ecosystems through platforms are the organizing environment to enact these.

It is knowing what is valuable in your innovation design that can then feed into the business ecosystem. The search is seemingly on for finding greater value and that will increasingly coalesce around innovation ecosystems.

Ecosystem thinking can have a very transforming effect.

Ecosystem management can open us up to a highly fluid, changing world of possibilities through collaborating together for a ‘given’ end. It can help allow you to match and possibly get ahead of all the volatility that is certainly swirling around us all. We can develop strategies that offer greater potential to solve complex problems built on emerging knowledge and innovations, that can grow out from a collaborating community, sharing and exchanging around a common goal or business objective.

We are increasingly in search of new Value-added ways to grow our businesses, and that ‘intent’ is driving a radically different environment to manage within; one of building knowledge ecosystems, innovation ecosystems and business ecosystems that connect up and form the interconnected parts of the required ecosystem design.

I believe ecosystems are the new organism of the business world.

We need to explore these increasingly in their design and management potential and for me, it is through all three of these ecosystems that we build collective capital than is far greater then the individual parts.

The three ecosystems of knowledge, innovation and business mutually reinforce each other, it is all their interacting parts, their interdependence to each other and how one part fits and reacts with the others, gives this great power.