5 tips for building your innovation ecosystem
In their quest for IT innovation, CIOs need to look beyond the typical “most innovative companies” lists. Innovation today is taking place at the platform level, which necessitates thinking more about vendors and partners in terms of how they fit into your ecosystem.
According to the IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Future of Industry Ecosystems 2021 Predictions, leaders can no longer view their organization in isolation and future success comes from being part of an industry ecosystem. In fact, IDC predicts this year, industry ecosystems will generate a 40% greater innovation rate than traditional approaches.
A key part of any strategy related to industry ecosystems, is deciding which to join and be a part of as a participant, and which ecosystems you might like to take more of a lead role as an orchestrator. The possibilities are endless: You might decide to place several bets and even form hybrid ecosystems where you’re building on top of an established ecosystem with your own partners and IP that creates a new derivative of the ecosystem itself.
Another key element, especially if you’re building your own industry ecosystem and go-to-market strategy, is which technology partners to align with and how to future proof as much as possible. In this article, we’ll focus on exactly that—i.e., How to find innovative technology partners for your own industry ecosystem so you can generate net new revenues from new business models.
The first step is to start with your strategy and your current state and future vision. Many industries are moving from use of standalone products and point solutions towards a more integrated suite of tools, often provided as a cloud-based platform business model. Organizations are looking to extend their revenues from project-based services to subscription-based services for annuity revenues.
As an example, this is happening right now in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry. For decades, work has been performed on a project-by-project basis using CAD and BIM software to create specific 2D and 3D deliverables for clients. With advances from major software providers such as Autodesk and Bentley, the industry is now moving more towards integrated suites of tools and industry clouds, which open the door to new business models and more collaborative ways of working.
As the use of digital twins advances in the industry, this opens up new possibilities for annuity revenues instead of project-based revenues by allowing AEC firms to manage and maintain these infrastructural digital twins (e.g. buildings, bridges, and roadways) for their clients.
By starting with your strategy, you can get a good sense of the diverse set of vendors and toolsets you utilize across your divisions and departments today as well as the future vision for where you believe things are heading. Most likely, it’s heading towards a cloud-based platform business model with an ecosystem of technology providers filling in the various service layers in the technology stack—such as visualization, design and modeling, collaboration, digital twins, integration, edge/IoT, cloud and data analytics.
While your services layers may vary based on your industry, this logical architecture from an IT services perspective is a great way to think about the various technology partners you may need in your ecosystem.
One way to validate your future vision is to monitor the signals coming from the market in terms of mergers and acquisitions. Going back to our AEC industry example, Autodesk’s recent acquisition of The Wild demonstrates the value of integrating AR/VR technologies into digital twin solutions so that customers can better visualize and collaborate around design or operational decisions regarding their physical assets.
