The Future of Platform-Ecosystem Thinking: A Sense-Making session

On 23 July 2020, we hosted a one-day online event to collectively understand the emerging challenges and new possibilities of building scalable platform strategies and ecosystemic organizations for a rapidly changing world. Find all our plenary sessions recorded below!

Trend update: Reflecting on the verticalization of market-networks and the impact of transformative technologies and risk factors.

By Simone Cicero, Co-Founder and CEO, Boundaryless.

FRAME #1:— Reshaping our organizations and society: brands, organizational shapes and common infrastructures

Special Guests:

Stowe Boyd, Founder, Work Futures. Editor, GigaOm.
Yolanda Martin, Director of Platform Ecosystem Design, Kaluza.

Moderator

Bill Fischer, Professor of Innovation Management, IMD.

FRAME #2 — Decentralising governance and production: the promise of technological evolutions

Special Guests:

Arthur Brock,Chief architect of Holochain.
Tomas Diez, Fab Lab Barcelona Co-founder, IAAC director and Fab City Global Initiative founding partner.

Moderator

Lisa Gansky, Entrepreneur. Co-Founder and Adviser, Boundaryless.

FRAME #3 — Drawing a new Human Development path in the Entrepreneurial age

Special Guests:

Indy Johar, Co Founder & executive Director at Dark Matter Laboratories.
with: Simone Cicero, Co-Founder and CEO, Boundaryless.

Moderator

Bill Fischer, Professor of Innovation Management, IMD.

FRAME #4 — Evolutionary frictions: Localism vs Globalism and the quest towards a healthier and more resilient society

Special Guests:

John Robb, Global Guerrillas Founder.
Michel Bauwens, Founder and Director, P2P Foundation.

Moderator

Lisa Gansky, Entrepreneur. Co-Founder and Adviser, Boundaryless.

Virtual Fishbowl

Special Guest:

In the virtual Fish bowl, we offered the possibility for the attendees to intervene, share ideas and ask critical questions.

Moderator

Guglielmo Apolloni, Social Inovator & Co-Design Lead, Boundaryless.

RETROSPECTIVE REFLECTION: Envisioning organisational evolution

In this session, the event co-hosts offered their closing remarks based on the previous panel discussions and the Fishbowl.

Event co-hosts:

Simone Cicero, Co-Founder and CEO, Boundaryless
Bill Fischer, Professor of Innovation Management, IMD.
Lisa Gansky, Entrepreneur. Co-Founder and Adviser, Boundaryless.

In this event, based on the research leading to our upcoming Whitepaper New Foundations of Platform-Ecosystem Thinking, we explored key insights into the evolving landscape of organising and how to play the right role in the business ecosystems unfolding, while embracing governance and value-creation models that ensure whole-system development.

Discover our Whitepaper research

The event has been an opportunity to:

FRAME

through conversations

Participants got an overall framing in order to identify and understand the big shifts happening in the economy, in technology, in culture and in the risk landscape.

DISCOVER

throught hands-on workshops

Attendees learned new, emerging techniques to design new strategies, and leverage on talent to develop entreprises that are deeply connected with their ecosystem.

SENSE-MAKE

in a premium session for Early Adopters Kit buyers

Together we mapped out the shifts and envision specific actions for you and your organization, setting your long term objectives and short term actions by zooming in and out.

If you like events like this and the contents we produce, would you consider sponsoring our research by becoming an Early Adopter? Your support helps us to keep all our knowledge and tools in the Creative Commons, open for everybody to enjoy. In addition, you'll get special perks like:

One fine printed copy of the White Paper shipped to your address
A personal mention in the whitepaper credits
Early access to digital releases of the White Paper in Beta
A lifetime 20% discount to all Boundaryless events.

Get your Early Adopter kit

Envisioning Organizational Evolutions

As a horizontal theme for the event, we explored how organizations everywhere – whether public, private or grassroot – could adapt to the need to retool themselves to be able to organise in vertical, techno-powered, niche market innovations and keep at speed with a rapidly changing world.

We’re witnessing the rule of platforms, aggregation and ecosystemic thinking playing out inside the organization and not just outside: becoming entrepreneurial and ecosystem-enabling, letting people learn to become “CEOs of themselves” while transcending the idea of the organisation as self-centered, but part of a bigger whole.

“Next generation of organising is about contextually unique solutions to emerge and adapt based on a coherent whole”
— Dave Snowden

We also dug deeper into other key theses emerging from the research:

Marketplace pervasiveness: the future of markets

We looked at the pervasiveness of the “marketplace” pattern as a dominating one in the organization of emerging market opportunities in consumer and B2B.

We will explore how — by reducing transaction costs and harnessing data — organizing markets digitally becomes a “no-brainer” in an increasingly big set of vertical and niche contexts.

Framing the systemic shift towards health

We explored how the global risk landscape is leading to a power shift towards the households and communities, triggering a re-regionalisation of economies and societies. We see this as pointing to an organisations that becomes more entangled in the local context and ramps up its role in society, beyond shareholder interest and towards systemic health.

Redrawing the human development thesis

We unpacked how a new human development thesis is needed for organisations to provide places humans new ways to learn and to reflect. Offering opptunities to learn faster is the “holy grail” in ecosystemic organisations, calling a combination between humans’ ability to think counterfactually and with imagination, with optimising tasks through machine learning and other technologies.

An online, collaborative
sense-making session:

Participants joined the event bringing their own experiences and questions related to the key insights presented in the opening sessions and through the research. Each part of the event helped to build key strategic insights and gain new skills through different formats: it started with inspirational framing sessions followed by practical 1.5 hour workshops and ending in a 2-hour sense-making session reserved for the Early Adopters Kit buyers.

Check out the Whitepaper web page to catch up on the contents!