The Learning Ecosystem

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“The employee of today is spending more time on self-directed learning than on internal or external learning offerings. To match this desire of learners within your organization, the company needs to be more responsive to learners’ desires, provide content over gimmicks, and create a whole learning ecosystem.” Cornell University’s ILR School

The need of digital transformation, increasing pace of innovation and market disruption have given new importance to workplace learning and development. With new technologies and new products constantly popping up, and the short life for new skills, workplaces need to become environments for constant learning. That’s how you disrupt the disruption, build a self-planning workforce and become agile enough to evolve well into the future.

• Do you have any system where your people with entrepreneurial mindset can share ideas, develop PoC / MVP?
• Do you have any learning arrangements where your curious people can know about the new technological research, new products, new innovations, changed customer behavior, new business models? Do your people have access to the data, insights, research papers, white papers, information, and analytical reports from your industry and tech experts?
• How do your people know about innovation, new product development initiatives within your organisation?
• How do you share the digitalization and digital transformation success and failure case studies, inputs and reviews of various external expertises?
• Do you have any arrangement to make your people familiar with collaboration and partnership opportunities with external ecosystems?
• Do you have any ecosystem or solution purposely designed and developed to mould and adapt to strategic outcome of your business?
• Do you have community of like-minded individuals (from top to bottom), learners, trainers, managers and external ecosystems that can come together to collaborate and share their accumulated knowledge for the benefit of everyone and the organisation?
• Do you have any development center where your people are constantly interacting with each other freely, giving everyone in the company access to the knowledge available from your employees who have certain skills, the pieces of content your leadership have chosen, and the unlimited resources of content?
• Do you have a process designed to encompass everything in a way that shares data and information?
• Do you have a single hub that allows all the information from different resources and technologies to integrate to each other?
• Do you have any platform for people to discover opportunities, such as interdepartmental projects, that will allow them to learn and apply new skills?

In the digital era, the product, business model and the platform are all indistinguishable. The more developed your strategy, the more developed your approach to partner ecosystems and your ability to collaborate on co-innovation and co-investment.

Leadership knows that ecosystems are keys to business model innovation and unlocking new sources of digital revenue growth. With many focused on incremental operational improvement, they miss the opportunity to create new and more compelling products and services, backed by an attractive new business models that maximizes value to the end customer.

“Organizations are mistakenly trying to achieve new growth and prosperity goals by fundamentally doing the same thing they always were, but expecting things to be different this time.”

Central role that effective ecosystem management plays in companies achieving their digital growth ambitions. New digital business models require the connectivity and collaboration provided by ecosystems to create sophisticated products and services that competitors cannot copy. However, simply bolting on ecosystems to an existing business model will not accomplish the digital business growth that organizations are aspiring to.

Business model reinvention and digital business growth depends on effective ecosystem management that maximizes value for the end customer.

A Learning Ecosystem develops a comprehensive solution that enables the organizations to learn, educate, aware, reskill and upskill their people. It can offer advanced, automated, and customizable tools to monitor, manage, evaluate, develop, assess/certify, and communicate within an advanced technological environment. All of this is focused on developing and evolving the learners’ community.

• Think beyond the Learning Management Systems, courses and programs
• You need execution and enablers because the more advanced you are in delivering new products and services, the greater the impact on the business model and the more your ecosystem will be built out
• Champion digital business growth by appointing a champion who will create and manage effective ecosystems with clear metrics and performance measurements
• Sponsor the necessary technology investments required to support effective ecosystems
• Set the tone in your organization by advocating non-linear thinking and encouraging ecosystem development outside your organization’s core competency
• Clearly understand the impact of the change to the operating model as new products and services are introduced into the market. Take action to continually adjust the operating model to best support the new and existing products and services
• Ensure performance transparency from the individual responsible for ecosystems with regards to the results, challenges, and actions required for continually managing the effective ecosystem
• Design the ecosystem technology carefully with a focus on the months and years ahead to enable an effective ecosystem where roles will evolve in the future.
• Justify ecosystem technology investments by explaining how these investments will prepare the organization for the future while meeting current demands
• Focus on learner experience and analytics first
• Start by designing for a comprehensive, holistic vision of the ecosystem you want
• Don’t just ask for familiar tools; look for the capabilities and requirements you need
• Aim for constant progress, improvement; constantly monitor, measure and optimize

So unlike a top-down hierarchical structure, a well defined and planned learning ecosystem maximizes the potential for everyone to benefit.

Research shows that the chance to learn is one of the most important factors attracting today’s employees, particularly millennials. With a learning ecosystem in place, your business will see employee retention and internal mobility rise. As tech giant found, the top 10% of companies fill more than 60% of jobs from within, while the bottom 10% fill only 35% internally.

To know about our Learning Ecosystem Framework and to discuss more on understanding the need of the learning ecosystem and how to build or set up learning ecosystem for your organisation, drop us an email.