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Ecosystem roundtable at Luxinnovation: April 2014

 

John Pritchard from MAC Solutions and myself just left the seminar room at the Luxembourg Chambre de Commerce where we ran a round table on our experiences of developing a Remote Monitoring Solutions Ecosystem.

Sometime it’s only when you present ideas, do you really gain an appreciation of the journey you have been on. Certainly developing an Ecosystem is no easy task. But we have seen that having a framework to follow, enables companies  to get to market faster at lower risk.

At the Luxinnovation round table, our grilling from companies such as Goodyear and Delphi certainly convinced me that we have developed a robust development model, with easy to use tools that break down the complexity.

Business ecosystems by their nature are complex and ever shifting. Without a good solid framework, we have seen it’s easy for companies to give away value and not build a resilient business. Our approach has been based on building up a comprehensive ANALYSIS based on customer value and segments. We use this to develop the basic BUILDING BLOCKS of the ecosystem, such as a clear definition of the business opportunity, value proposition and the roles.  Having defined the core elements of the building blocks, we can get into EXECUTION; constructing the business model and the detailed business plan to achieve results.  But then RESILIENCE is a key feature to be tested. We need to ensure that the business model of our partners and our customers are aligned.

And to cap it all, just when you think you have finished, the landscape of the ecosystem shifts and you have to go back and re-think the relationships.

As we left the meeting John said to me; ‘You know the power of our ecosystem model is that it has allowed me to articulate my intuitive business thinking and so make clearer decisions as to how we make our MAC Solution RMS ecosystem a reality’