The Open Way
Building innovation ecosystems
(building on discussions published for Nutanix Futures Forum and key note talks with US Economic Institutions)
Evolving the elements of innovation
As institutions worldwide steadily migrate to cloud operations and increased decentralization, there is a new understanding of the strengths in leveraging technology ecosystems versus centralized capability. The focus is shifting toward orchestrating innovation, powered by hyper-scalability and integrated with open collaboration. Google's design of Kubernetes for container orchestration, has transformed the way companies build and manage their applications in the cloud; AWS has created a vast ecosystem of third-party plug-in tools; Microsoft continuously embraces open-source for increased collaboration, and cloud communities have emerged across a vast range of topics, maintaining relevance and use in standards and long term value. Studies show that over 75% of global enterprise's now see decentralized innovation as strategic to growth, and yet, such open collaboration requires alignment and structure for sustained effect.
How can legacy technology centers architect for decentralized innovation and embrace the open way?
90% increase in active Decentralized Innovation over last 5 years (2018-2023), based on 500 global organizations
Innovation labs and sandboxes may stimulate ideas but innovation is more than a project, it is a change continuum involving any party that interacts with an ecosystem. In this view, it is useful to extend the norms of technical pilots, and reconsider how three elements of innovation capability can evolve: Invention, Investment and Implementation.
Invention: With new focuses on discrete innovation, and low code enablement for automation and AI, enhancements and disruptive invention increasingly come from anywhere in the ecosystem of the entity driving the invention. Harnessing this and engaging cross-divisional expertise helps to determine and curate the true scope and context for invention.
Investment: With new demands for speed and resilience measures, more rigorous, creative scenarios and stress-testing, demonstrate a full extent of impact and sustained advantage. Institutions and even nations have historically lagged, by only measuring economic impact through the limited scope of the digital interface. In reality, digital inventions have far reaching impacts, and detailing these is crucial to understanding total economic value.
Implementation: The scope of transformation through digitization and data architecture now touches practically all systems and processes, and executing at scale, with sustained effort across multiple parties requires clear transition design. This supports not only positive disruption, but instilling of the vision and confidence to embark on transformation.
The evolution of these three elements of Innovation, sets a stage for how legacy technology functions are working toward coordinated integration with innovation ecosystems, using new techniques, measurement and incentive.
Building blocks for the innovation ecosystem
The Art of Composition
Today, competitive and resilience stance hinges on abilities to reimagine an enterprise as a portfolio of resources, delivered dynamically through cloud models and an extended ecosystem. The analogy of monolithic software, rearchitected for micro-communication, transposes to a re-architecture of the monolithic institution, toward discrete, orchestrated provision of resources and communications. In this view, the art of resource composition and extended resilience, ultimately emerges as an democratized data mesh. An open flow and close design partnership between technology centers, partners, owners and users, reducing bottlenecks and building trust into the process. Innovation through upgrade and migration is continuous within technology functions, and yet often invisible. By surfacing continuous technology innovation within policy and design, more targeted innovation is achieved, with increased re-use, scale and value.
Furthermore, the constraints of regulation have historically not merely hindered, but also driven innovation. The capital markets, by example, regularly seek out advantage in market constraints. Today, forward-thinking technology functions are converting regulatory constraints in areas of data protection and innovating hybrid cloud models which better enable international cross-border flows. Concepts of resilience and security have become cornerstones and enablers, getting technology to the governance table. New concerns in sustainability have increasingly sought input from technology functions, linking sustainability and digitization objectives across physical and virtual assets.
Simulation Environments
Innovation architecture is evolving toward increasingly sophisticated models of the physical structure, mapping risk data to event-chains and architectural design. By modelling out a Digital Twin Ecosystem, it is possible to play out scenarios and futures across internal and external ecosystems. In this view, new initiatives can be risk mitigated, curated and optimized for sustained growth, particularly in decentralized environments, with high levels of uncertainty. In traditional analytics, the view is often externally focused on trends and patterns, while a Digital Twin Ecosystem can surface interacting internal and external views to ‘test-drive’ new environments and fast-track time to value.
Major migrations and transformations such as those seen in cloud-first strategies, have far reaching impact. Dimensions of people, process and partners collide head-on with changes in technology and data. A 360° simulation model, captures these dimensions to quantify impact, navigate interdependency and enable more effective measurement of the value. More specifically, a 360° model navigates the timing of innovation as the total environment matures its capabilities and interacts with new systems. Digital Twin Ecosystems create powerful simulations for playing out futures and adaptive capacity.
Alignment & Autonomy
The globally distributed and decentralized nature of a modern ecosystem can introduce significant disconnects in innovation activity and outcomes. Rewarding individuals while harnessing collective strengths is difficult to navigate across a total environment of partners, cultures, modes and capabilities. Open collaboration is optimized when its communities are transparent, inclusive, and sustainable, using common standards and mutualized communication.
The ‘innovation center’ concept originated in the start-up community, but within large, distributed technology functions, the expected type of innovation is different, and therefore structure and measurement more diverse and nuanced. Legacy measures have often suffocated innovation, leading to a movement toward integrated measurement and collaborative platforms, aligning objectives across disparate operations, while maintaining decentralization and freedom of invention. This freedom comes with the built-in caveat that individuals cannot achieve innovation alone.
Architecting the future
These concepts for innovation ecosystems are amongst those currently at the forefront of decentralized innovation. In action, they are forcing institutions to think outside legacy bureaucracy, while driving diversity, engagement and connected environments. They are helping cross-border institutions and corporations to go beyond monopolistic ambitions and play better to their respective strengths.
With the advent of cloud models, low code and hyper-scalability, creating an innovation capability is no longer a feat of software development, but an endeavor of data curation and ecosystem connectivity. While still a work in process, Web 3 concepts, with advanced security protocols and smart contracts, will ultimately go beyond new value-chains, to drive a next generation of decentralized innovation, with coordinated investment.
Technology functions everywhere have an imperative to assert themselves in the evolution of the three elements of innovation capability. Continuously driving techniques that support and evangelize decentralized innovation and embrace the Open Way, as a powerful multiplier for accelerating technology, collaboration and equality.
Author: Ivan Sean, c. 2021 | USA
© 10 Sensor Foresight
Period: 2020-2021 | Language: English
Core Concepts: Open Innovation; Innovation Ecosystems
AI-Usage: Non-generative digital platforms, output validation
Conflict of Interest: None
References: Futures Forum, Nutanix, 2021 | 'Innovation Ecosystems', Key Note Talk, US Economic Institutions, USA 2018