There is a real need for three distinct Ecosystems within any Business Design. I believe ecosystems are the new organism of the business world to innovative, network, and connect.

Organise these correctly and you have a really powerful collaborative force.

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, that gives this great power.

We need to recognise business ecosystems are emerging as a real competitive force

We all need to recognise 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 and it is through an ecosystem design you can extract greater value. 

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 greater collective thinking, that is built through 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 ‘standalone’ 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.

Recognising the interdependence of three ecosystems for business design.

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

The focus of a company is to combine three ecosystems.

It is recognising 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 both ‘interaction and interdependence’ so as to find ways to tackle more complex, challenging problems in collaborative ways.

It is recognising that each has a different part to play, to provide us with a growing, connected understanding. It is the interdependence of knowledge, innovation, and business formed around each other, designed on a common platform that will give us a certain “synthesis” as the combined effect will greatly extend our resources and capital by offering increased value and growth potential, more ingenuity and creativity, ideas ‘arriving’ from multiple parts of these ecosystems.

One triggers and feeds into another and generates 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.

The key is to link what are today the three interdependent ecosystems

To plug into achieving this ‘paradigm shift’ we have to learn to be far more open and trusting, we need to form mutual governance and guidelines to determine the history of having the original idea, turning it into concepts, managing it, piloting it and then bringing it to commercial fruition.

We need to manage the effective use of knowledge in ecosystems as insights and connections.

The concept of Knowledge Graphs seems to work here to organise the effective use of knowledge, its generation, acquisition, integration, and the application of (new) knowledge needs us all to manage to learn in a different, more structured and designed way. Knowledge underpins innovation, it informs it, the more it ‘relates’ the content needs to be combined constantly with the context. We do need to upgrade how we experience, experiment and absorb learning and this is increasingly outside our own organisations, where we look constantly to bring it in

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, so it feeds and builds our innovation and business needs.

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 one 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 organisation, and ecosystems through platforms are the organising 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.