Opinion
Ecosystems boost digital services business
Proving that good things come in threes, this week Sari Torkkola shares a trio of learnings she has accrued from ecosystem initiatives.
To build meaningful wholeness for the customer in a highly specialised world, calls for ecosystems. As Dr. W. Edwards Deming says, leaders need to manage systems thinking in order to succeed:
“The aim proposed here for any organization is for everybody to gain –stockholders, employees, suppliers, customers, community, the environment – over the long term.”
Today Dr. Deming’s words resonate in Finland. The digitalisation boom and data-driven business goals have awakened us to realise we gain better results in co-operation. In addition, European Unions’s digital inner market provides scaling business opportunities.
Until now, famous and innovative Finnish ecosystems are, for example, the Linux open source community and Slush, the leading startup event for founders and investors in Northern Europe. Today, there are new ecosystems growing in the fields of mobility and transportation services, construction as a service, digital manufacturing and cyber security.
The top three points I have learned when participating in several ecosystem initiatives are:
Trust: Ecosystem development is an investment. You need to meet people personally and create relationships, as well as to choose, in which partnerships you are willing to invest.
Knowledge sharing: When enthusiast people from diverse industries meet, they find new ideas as well as comfort in the joint quest to explore digitalisation.
Orchestration: Leading an ecosystem is leading creativity. There needs to be an orchestrator, who makes sure all participants gain value.
Particularly keen to promote ecosystems is Tekes, the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation. As a result, it gathered in October over thousand business leaders to the Finlandia Hall in Helsinki. One viewpoint strongly emphasised was the need to build global participation. Finnish companies and authorities are open to join forces internationally to make their ecosystems successful.
Now is a great time for you to visit Finland and find partners in exploring new business models in digital services.