Ecosystem Advantage: How to Successfully Harness the Power of Partners

Abstract

Changes in the global environment are generating opportunities for companies to build advantage by creating loosely coupled networks or ecosystems. Ecosystems are larger, more diverse, and more fluid than a traditional set of bilateral partnerships or complementors. By leveraging ecosystems, companies can deliver complex solutions while maintaining corporate focus. This article describes six keys to unlock ecosystem advantage: pinpointing where value is created, defining an architecture of differentiated partner roles, stimulating complementary partner investments, reducing the transaction costs, facilitating joint learning across the network, and engineering effective ways to capture profit.

The role of shared intentions in the emergence of service ecosystems

“…This perspective contributes to the management literature on business ecosystem (Iansiti & Levien, 2004;Moore, 1993Moore, , 2013Thomas, 2013;Williamson & De Meyer, 2012) by underscoring the structuration processes at play in the emergence of ecosystems and by clarifying the role of individual and collective agency and, in particular, intentionality.…”

“…Management researchers are increasingly interested in the development of new collaborative market structures that invite a re-writing of the very premises of how firms think about value creation (Iansiti & Levien, 2004;Moore, 2013;Williamson & De Meyer, 2012). Service-dominant logic (S-D logic) lies at the forefront of this rethinking with its concept of service ecosystem, defined as "a relatively self-contained, self-adjusting system of resource-integrating actors connected by shared institutional arrangements and mutual value creation through service exchange" (Vargo & Lusch, 2016, p. 10).…”

Maneuvering in Poor Visibility: How Firms Play the Ecosystem Game when Uncertainty is High

“…Firms increasingly form 'innovation ecosystems' to implement complex value propositions (e.g., Adner, 2012;Kapoor & Lee, 2013;Nambisan & Baron, 2013;van der Borgh et al, 2012;Williamson & De Meyer, 2012). Defined as "the collaborative arrangements through which firms combine their individual offerings into a coherent, customer-facing solution" (Adner, 2006: 98), at the core of an innovation ecosystem, one often finds a technology platform: a set of shared assets, standards, and interfaces that underpins an activity system surrounding it (Gawer, 2014;Thomas et al, 2014).…”

“…The standard response to this dilemma is that the ecosystem champion, or 'keystone' (Iansiti & Levien, 2004), should come up with a compelling 'blueprint' for the future ecosystem; one vision that clearly defines the ecosystem value proposition (i.e., what value is created, how, and for whom) and associated structures of governance and interaction (i.e., who does what, who controls what, and how everyone will benefit) (Adner, 2006(Adner, , 2012Edelman, 2015;Eisenmann, 2008;Iansiti & Levien, 2004;Williamson & De Meyer, 2012). A compelling vision, hence, reduces uncertainty, facilitates coordination, and enables the focal firm to paint the future ecosystem as an impending reality, prompting potential stakeholders to join early for fear of 'missing the train' (Ozcan & Eisenhardt, 2009;Santos & Eisenhardt, 2009).…”

IP Models to Orchestrate Innovation Ecosystems: IMEC, a Public Research Institute in Nano-Electronics

“…1 Depending on the innovation needs of the industry, ecosystems can be made up of different sets of partners at different times where companies collaborate and pool their resources on a temporary basis to achieve joint innovation goals while sharing associated costs and risks. 2 Innovation ecosystems generate value for partners by reducing development costs and risks and by combining complementary knowledge, enabling partners to address problems with high complexity. 3 Ecosystem partners can subsequently use the knowledge created within ecosystems to support their own businesses.…”