This graphic from Piotr Drozd summed up 6 months of research in 2023. We’ve held it close since in the development of our open learning programme - First Hand.
The diagram imagines a world where you pool ideas, resources and even profits with your fiercest competitors, where insights and advice are free range not gate kept and where your willingness to help is incentivised as much as your willingness to not help is now. Sounds radical? But it’s happening today — and it’s driving innovation, resilience, and sustainability.
Someone you wouldn’t expect me to be quoting in a briefing on sustainability and Climate Action is Boston Consulting Group. But big business is already enacting that diagram:
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“From media and technology to energy and mining—no major industry is untouched by the rise of business ecosystems. These dynamic groups of largely independent economic players working together to deliver solutions that they couldn’t muster on their own.” (Boston Consulting Group)
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The idea - that openness and collaboration are no longer optional - is accepted and even mainstream in those quarters - you can look to Tesla with their open patents scheme or Gucci and Adidas with their Fashion Pact. They know that we need these approaches to survive in complexity and uncertainty:
But in many, many others open and collaborative approaches are seen as marginal to the point of being dismissed. And that’s just the ideas, before getting to the knowhow to make it real.
What we’ve seen during our 18 months of activity:
The problem is that there are so SO many of the first set and so so few of the last. For an approach to business that’s accepted as critical to our sustainable future to be so patchy is hugely problematic.