Thinking about Business Ecosystems – Part 2
Friday, May 8th, 2009 by Luciana Bruzzi
I ended my last post with the question “How to improve the overall health of the business ecosystem?”. Well, let’s discuss a little more about this topic.
The Harvard Business Review “Strategy as Ecology” point out three items to measure the ecosystem health – productivity, robustness and niche creation. Productivity is the ability to create new products with lower prices. It can be measured by the return on invested capital. Robustness is the capability of surviving changes, as technological ones. The number of ecosystems members is a way to measure it. Niche creation is the potential for productive innovation. It can be measured by the capacity to increase diversity by creating new products and, as a consequence, reaching new niches.
Another relevant item in a business ecosystem is the “keystone organization”. I’ve just learned about it. Keystone organizations have an important role in a business ecosystem; which is to improve its overall health. They can do it by providing services, technologies or tools that all members can use to increase their performance.
The existence of the keystone organizations in a business ecosystem is so crucial to its health that it can also affect it negatively, even lead to an entire collapse. Do you agree?
May 9th, 2009 at 12:52 pm
There are interesting parallels between the biz ecosystems you mention and bio-ecosystems.
1) productivity: you mention the capability of an enterprise to create more at a lower price as a competitive advantage. For a species in a bio ecosystem it means producing more offsprings and consuming less energy
2) Robustness: capability of an enterprise to survive changes (crucial in these times of global competition and short product life cycle). For a species it means the creation of variants that can better adapt to a changing environment (nice to see how in both cases robustness is strongly connected to productivity and market space).
3) Niche creation: capability of an enterprise to differentiate is position on a market to attack niches with different (innovative) products. For a species it means the adaptation to harvest new resources where these are available (niches in the ecosystem).
Interesting also the concep of keystone organizations that in bio-ecosystems transform into those species that for their connectivity to the other species are basically keeping the ecosystem together. This is well modelled by the small world theory where we can see what are the nodes that keep the whole graph connected. Interestingly these do not necessarily are the ones having most connections.
May 10th, 2009 at 9:44 am
A brief comment on Keystone organization:
I think that keystone organizations must have:
1) Organizational Culture that must be openess to change and oriented to a cooperative approach;
2) Leadership with a clear business ecosystem vision;
3) Capability to communicate their vision to the ecosystem;
4) Global approach that means to be able to work either on local markets or on global markets.
In this way keystone organizations can be seen like a pattern to imitate; this can facilitate a common vision and to be a factor for integration within the ecosystem.