By Emmanuel Oluebube, Correspondent UK

The tactical and strategic priority list for leadership, built on the premise of a steady rate of change, has changed dramatically in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing economic uncertainty. Organizations are embracing radical change in short periods of time to survive and thrive.

Initiatives that deliver resiliency, agility, responsiveness, and trust must now be implemented to maintain business growth. As a result, companies across industries are building ecosystems of partners that can help expedite the flow of money, goods, and services and innovate rapidly. To guide organizations through these changes, International Data Corporation (IDC) has published the Future of Industry Ecosystems framework.

IDC recognizes that the movement toward industry-wide ecosystems is happening now and gathered a group of its leading analysts across the globe to define what the Future of Industry Ecosystems looks like. The Future of Industry Ecosystems goes beyond partnering with more companies and organizations; it is also about leveraging the sharing of data, applications, operations, and expertise — expanding upon the platform, sharing economy that was built over the past five years. The segments of sharing across an industry ecosystem encompass the following:

Sharing data and insights to ensure security, reduce fraud, improve functional safety and security, and encourage new, mission-critical innovations as well as cross-ecosystem reporting on issues such as sustainability.

Sharing new applications to enable data and insights, improve operational efficiency, or deliver better customer experiences.

Sharing operations and expertise so that organizations can scale up and down their capability and capacity for new products and services to meet market, customer, and consumer needs.

The future of industry ecosystems is open, dynamic, and shared; evolving like a biological ecosystem that changes in response to pressure, competition, or disruption. Businesses that consider their ecosystem an expansive set of building blocks will be able to adjust to meet market change or opportunity as required, much in the same way nature finds a way to adapt.

“Industry ecosystems are critical for success in the digitally transformed, disrupted world we live in today because the complexity of products, supply chains, digital experiences, and changing market and customer/consumer needs are too great for any one organization to address on its own. As organizations understand these shifts, they form new, additional partnerships in industry ecosystems — within their industry or across others — that deliver value, create resiliency, foster innovation, and anticipate threats and opportunities,” said programme director, Product Innovation Strategies at IDC, Jeffrey Hojlo.