Ecosystem Innovation

OPPORTUNITY – Facts for Experts and Decision Makers

Innovation managers deal with emerging trends in technology, business and society, and translate them into innovations. The trend toward digitization also plays a major role in innovations; for example, many products and services are becoming more interconnected through digital technologies. This creates complexity in many market and product environments for customers and companies. The entertainment ecosystem is an impressive illustration of this complexity.

The entertainment ecosystem

The example of the entertainment ecosystem illustrates how products are increasingly networked in complex systems.

From the customer‘s perspective, products can be interchangeable or used in combination with each other. Products that are used in combination with others represent a system from the customer‘s perspective. Therefore, the customer no longer makes purchasing decisions solely for individual products. Interdependencies between products are taken into account because they have an influence on the customer‘s satisfaction.

Companies have always been faced with the challenge of developing new, marketable products. In doing so, innovation managers often focus on isolated product features. When products are no longer isolated, but rather used and applied in networked systems, this method of innovating is no longer sufficient. Existing customer requirements are constantly changing and new ones are added. To meet these new requirements, additional product features become relevant, for which innovation managers must find solutions.

In this OPPORTUNITY, we describe how these systems evolve from products and how innovation managers can innovate beyond isolated product features. Eight approaches are presented to derive innovation ideas for the new customer requirements.

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