Three case studies on connecting ecosystems

Innovation across ecosystems

Like most good ideas, innovations that connect disparate ecosystems can seem "obvious" as soon as they are explained. In the three examples below, the ecosystems go from very well defined one-to-one relationship between two companies, fairly well defined one-to-many relationship where a company leads the conversation, to a very loosely defined one-to-many relationship where no one entity can drive the agenda by itself.

BMW ConnectedDrive

Most of us have used a GPS system to navigte an unfamiliar terrain. Most of us have also used Google Maps to locate a new place before getting into a car. So, why not combine the two? BMW and Google talked, both side thought it was a cool feature, and viola!

See a video on how it works http://www.bmw.com/com/en/insights/technology/connecteddrive/online_google.html

Intuit's Entrepreneur Day

Intuit is a classic example of having strong distribution channels to customers. It hosts an annual Entrepreneur Day where companies are invited to pitch their product/ideas to the senior business leaders. It has a well choreographed process on how to manage this process, before, during, and after the Entrepreneur Day.

See a video with Intuit's CTO and VP of Open Innovation http://www.intuitcollaboratory.com/entrepreneur-day/

Google Labs

Google is known for shipping "beta" products. For example, Gmail for the longest time was in beta and access was by invitation only. But, these "beta" products are arguably in production grade already. So, where do the "alpha" products that feed into the "beta" funnel come from?

Instead of an internal only process, Google, and increasingly other organizations, are setting up open "labs" where new ideas can be exposed to the public and usage feedback collected. The idea being that you can make the kill v.s keep decision with higher degree confidence. Some of the "graduates" of the Google Labs include such notables as Google Alerts, something that I get everyday, and Google Maps, see BMW example above.

About Google Labs http://www.googlelabs.com/faq