Breaking New Ground

In the past, when we spoke about innovation, we meant the creation of new products and solutions for a specific market. Today and in the future, innovation will be about designing global digital ecosystems around a specific customer value. Ecosystems consistently place the user at the center of value creation. They offer the chance to leave the ‘red ocean’ of price competition and commoditized products. Instead, they open up a ‘blue ocean’ with new digital solutions and new rules of the game in global markets. This chapter introduces you to an ecosystem-based leadership approach that is tailor-made for the world of digital platforms and ecosystems. You will learn how leaders can build ecosystems for innovation inside an organization and thus break new ground towards the unknown. The more a solution, e.g. in the Industry 4.0 context, is itself determined by autonomous, networking units, the more precisely these abilities must be activated in the innovation teams. It is essential to bring about diverse individual interactions, offer open working spaces, and use the output of the emerging interactions to gain competitive advantages. In this world, communication will be at the very heart of your workplace. You will now quit the organizational pyramid with one person in charge at the top and you will enter the world of adaptive dynamic ecosystems instead. Against this backdrop of a new organizational paradigm, the chapter will examine how leaders will have to adapt their role in the environment of new working methods and philosophies. For this purpose, three communication-based courses of action will be presented. First, the systems-oriented approach of ecosystem management is introduced. Second, an excursus into agile working methods discusses the role of communication in agile, autonomous, self-organized teams. Third, the section on design thinking dives into a practical approach to enhance creativity through interdisciplinary collaboration and describes how leaders can shape a new mindset in organizations.