Stay a Front Runner
Be on the cutting edge
We are no longer living in a “fast-changing world,” but rather a VUCA environment — Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous. Companies who do not adequately prepare for this world cannot build sustainable growth. In times when change and innovation take place faster, standing still has an expensive price tag. By identifying trends early, companies can increase their market share in a sustainable way and become more successful in the long term. Today, innovation is a top priority. Companies must therefore understand the dynamics of their market and their business environment. They must be on the cutting edge.
THE FUTURE BELONGS TO ECOSYSTEMS: COOPERATION IS THE NEW COMPETITION
Today, competitive advantage is not determined by the resources that you manage, but by resources to which you have access. The use of platforms to gain access to ecosystems of technology, talent and information increase. The future belongs to ecosystems. Networks of organizations transacting to create value for themselves and the rest of the ecosystem within one or more market environments. Each participant could benefit if they had a more holistic view of their collective efforts.
Much more complex than linear supply chains, business ecosystems are groups of companies and other actors (platform providers, government agencies, independent contractors, co-creating customers, and so on) whose contributions come together to produce value.
Roche Diabetes Care uses DataScouts as a market intelligence platform to analyse and monitor companies around the world providing solutions for everything related to Diabetes. The platform is used to create transparency and increase information sharing across divisions and countries
Through an in-depth understanding of your ecosystem, you get to know your competitors and partners better. This goes further than your direct and indirect competitors. You also have to keep in mind to look outside of your own industry. But the economy’s shift in this all-encompassing direction means interconnection with the rest of the world becomes not only a nice-to-have but a necessity. Every organization exists in multiple business ecosystems.
This requires companies to create business strategies that capitalize on relationships to create maximum value in the market. A strategy to survive this faster environment is collaboration. The road to success brings you to the center of the network.
ING uses the banking of things umbrella initiative to connect and cross-pollinate value on a bigger scale, for example enabling easier payments at petrol stations by partnering with car manufacturer BMW.
Moreover, the shared knowledge forms an excellent barometer not only for the speed of technological changes but also a deeper insight into the acceptance by your consumer. Tech Scouting helps identify future trends and technologies, find new partners and inspire your organization with relevant use cases, future scenarios and sample business models.
Apple, Fitbit and Garmin created an ecosystem focused on fitness and apps.
COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE IS EASIER THAN EVER
Competition information is big business. Recent studies have shown that 89% of participants recognize competition information as a strategic asset. Making assumptions is bad in business, because assumptions are often wrong. And they can change things terribly. By conducting a thorough competition analysis, you get accurate and factual information about your competitors and market.
Conducting a competitive analysis has never been easier and more important. In the past it was difficult to gather information about the rival of a company and this often led to illegal acts. But today have open business information that is available to everyone online.
YOUR ROLE AS INNOVATION MANAGER
“It is hard to keep on top of industry trends and changes. It is even harder to transform market trends and innovations in the business ecosystem into specific actions to drive a company’s growth.”
As a company one sees the external changes that ecosystem thinking entails: opportunities and responsibilities have changed thanks to direct interactions with consumers. Internally, the company is being radically restructured into hundreds of entrepreneurial cells, all fueled by a common infrastructure platform.
ING uses DataScouts as an extension of their internal CRM system. DataScouts provides and an ad-hoc segmentation predicting growth based upon a wide range of data points and digital metrics.
As an innovation manager you get to process this internal information, from data, news articles and input from others. You want to be aware of what is happening in your business environment and identify trends on an early phase. Employees at all levels in your organization and in all steps of the customer’s value chain come across relevant information. It is not easy to transform this individual information into a common understanding and a joint action plan.
CIOs and IT leaders must shift and expand their mindset and approach to focus on their organization’s strategy and execution within their business ecosystems from an outside-in perspective. The challenge is deciding how your organization will survive and thrive in its ecosystem. Decide what role your organization will play in these ecosystems: leader, disruptor, niche player, orchestrator, or something else.
You are responsible for the technology that will enable the business ecosystem strategy now and in the future. Success will require a strategic integration of technology, information and business processes. If you don’t understand your business ecosystem, you risk to fall in a participatory role. Instead of just participating and enabling your partners or competitors to take a leadership role, you can define the rules for engagement in that ecosystem and take the leadership role yourself.
STRATEGY AND TACTICS
Before you take strategic decisions about how to participate or change tactics, consider the following elements.
The degree of openness within ecosystems is driven by strategies, shared interest and common goals. The openness of an ecosystem has two implications. The degree of change is dependent upon the possibility of new entrants and disruption to relationships and value. Secondly it will also define the nature of the relationships in the ecosystems, on how those relationships are formed and maintained. At last the degree of openness will define the nature of collaboration and competitions.
As an innovation manager, you need to know the diversity of the ecosystem and the engagement of the diverse participants. The roles of participants evolve depending on the situation, which has an influence on how solutions are defined and supported.
When BMW and Toyota need to develop key technologies, such as batteries, they may join together and then later go on to compete in the marketplace.
It’s important to understand the changing definition of “value” that ecosystems create. In addition to monetary-based value exchange ecosystems enable companies to exchange products and services for information or analytics.
Probably your organization will be involved in multiple ecosystems. The key is to understand how these ecosystems interact. Are there potential fractures or overlaps? Overlapping ecosystems can create a new ecosystem or will highlight redundancy.
Your challenges:
Situational awareness: mapping and knowing your business ecosystem by using collective intelligence.
For a holistic and future-oriented image, the analysis must combine statistics such as profitability and growth with more qualitative indicators such as competition intensity, economic interdependence and sustainability.
· Conduct research inside and outside your industry to explore for signals of disruption and opportunities for growth.
· Build an overview of key market trends and drivers for change.
· Map the innovation ecosphere for your industry, i.e. competitors, startups, partners, incubators & accelerators.
Take a leadership role in your business ecosystem:
· Reach out to collaborate with business counterparts on how and why to integrate ecosystems to improve the overall corporate strategy.
· Create value for the ecosystem on long term: ensure any customer-, partner-, employee- or supplier-focused applications or solutions being developed today are at least considering these future business ecosystems.
Take a leadership innovator role in your company: Make sure to set aside development budget every year for the next five years for applications, solutions and supporting infrastructure to enable change to reflect evolving ecosystem strategies. By automating the scouting and cracking of data, more time is left for the analysis and translation of the insights into concrete action.
· Automate the data collection process by systematically collecting structured and unstructured data about relevant companies, market trends and emerging technologies.
· Systematically monitor the actors that are relevant to your business, clustered into portfolios and scores against KPIs that matter to your business.
· Build ad-hoc analysis and visualization on one common database, the one version of the truth representing all relevant actors in your ecosystem.
· Implement a collaborative work flow to build an accurate overview of an innovation ecosystem. Invite team members to add personal notes and to complete individual score card per company.
We Connect Data will help you to think ahead and move fast by delivering a digital snapshot of your business ecosystem. Thanks to this AI- enabled collective intelligence platform, you spot market trends, relevant innovations, emerging technologies and influential dealmakers in your business environment. In addition it offers a collaborative workflow and drives collective intelligence across all levels of the organisation.
