Bridges To Knowledge: A Blog by Barry Camson

Creating a Better World

 

To survive into the future, businesses, organizations and our global society will need to develop updated assumptions about what it takes to do well as inhabitants of this planet. New ideas about the relationship of the economy, businesses, the individual and the biosphere will need to be developed to replace outdated ones. We need a new story of humanity's place as a contributor to the thriving ecosystem of our planet that reflects our full human potential.

Integrating Ecosystem and Value Chain Design in Sustainability Efforts, Revisited

How can one use the practice of design to implement sustainability approaches in organizations and in their surrounding ecosystems?

This is a daunting challenge especially with regard to ecosystems because the ecosystem of even a small polluter can be inhabitants of the entire planet or certainly a region of the globe.

One really needs to take a whole-earth perspective to fully comprehend this. This is vividly demonstrated in the recent "school-strike" catalyzed by Greta Thunberg of Sweden which involved 1.6 million young people in almost 1700 cities and towns in over 123 countries in every continent.

We do have to start somewhere in terms of organizations and one place to start is to gain a concept of the system with which we are dealing. This involves viewing the organization in terms of what may be a more linear, value-chain as well as seeing the organization as part of a larger ecosystem.

A Contemporary Perspective on Corporate Sustainability v. 2

Marjorie Kelly writes in Owning Our Future,

"You don't start with the corporation and ask how to redesign it. You start with life, with human life and the life of the planet, and ask, how do we generate the conditions for life's flourishing?"

The most contemporary approach to achieving these life-giving goals gaining increasing support in our global society is the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. There are 17 of them which over time have been described and further developed. A recent document, Blueprint For Business Leadership On The SDG's, sets out action steps for achieving these goals.

Integrating Ecosystem and Value Chain Design in Sustainability Efforts

There are several important questions with regard to using design to improve sustainability in organizations. The first is how does one take a large-scale ecosystem perspective to design while also maintaining a more detailed, linear value chain perspective. The second is what role does the customer journey and experience play regarding these two perspectives especially in large systems. This post looks at both of these.

Ecosystem Members Co-creating Designs

I have been expressing the idea in previous posts that in an ecosystem, knowledge and skills are continually exchanged by members of the ecosystem in the process of ongoing value co-creation. In this article, I will apply this to designing in ecosystems.

Lately, I have read some academic articles that talk about extending this process of value co-creation to participative, redesign efforts in an ecosystem. As Lucy Kimbell from the University of Oxford states, design can be a distributed social effort in which the role of a central designer is not privileged. In this view, design is carried out by professional designers and by end-users and others. (Kimbell, 2011, 2012). In practice, this could include members of the HR organization.

Touch Points and Deliberations: Cal Pava Meets the 21st Century

What does Cal Pava's groundbreaking work on Deliberations in organization redesign have to tell us about analyzing touch points along the customer journey as part of a design process? Are there other contemporary models that can be illuminating in analyzing touch points in the process of design?

This article will review these models and then arrive at practical and theoretically sound questions that can be used as a basis for analyzing and redesigning touch points as part of a customer journey and the surrounding ecosystem of value co-creation. This falls within the approach that I have been describing in previous posts about adaptive design for collaborative ecosystems.

Adaptive Design For Collaborative Ecosystems

This article sets out a working description of a collaborative ecosystem in which value is co-created. It describes what needs to be attended to in the process of adaptive design for the ecosystem. It sets out a path forward in pursuing adaptive design for a collaborative ecosystem.

Are you an Ecosystem?

Being an ecosystem involves recognizing all those engaged in the co-creation of value and in ongoing relationships with one another constituting a larger network. This is qualitatively different from seeing your organization plus all of the business relationships it has with its different providers and stakeholders. It is different from seeing your customer or client as the recipient of the goods or services that you develop.

Discovering the Ecosystem Within: An Approach to Design

The great irony with regard to business ecosystems is that businesses are not organized as ecosystems while at the same time they are ecosystems. All of the components of an ecosystem may already be resident in and about the organization while at the same time not being recognized as such. This post describes the phenomena and then takes a step toward addressing how to intervene to bring the ecosystem into ascendance.

Let's look for some of the attributes of an ecosystem in the contemporary organization. They exist in various stages of development.

Whither the Ecosystem: Thoughts on Business Ecosystem Design

If we are going to be productive in terms of adding value in our contemporary world, we have a number of choices about how we go about doing that. What kind of human and business relationships do we develop with those around us? This post looks at the value chain, the value network and developing ideas of the business ecosystem and then moves on to address specific aspects of ecosystem design.

Five Soda Bottles In Search Of An Author

This week I attended "Environment and Sustainability 2050" in Tel Aviv. One of the exhibitors there was the firm Envitech which describes itself as dealing with environmental and climate monitoring systems. They provide the hardware and software for such monitoring systems. The resulting data then appear on sites like envihaifa.org.il which monitors air quality in Haifa where I live. In my conversation with Shay Cohen, the Operational Manager for the firm, it became clear to me that there is an important next step in the overall process of increasing sustainability in our societies.