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?

After reading an article about creating value in a business ecosystem I started to think about the maintenance of the complex relationships between the ecosystem’s participants.

All the members of a business ecosystem, like a biological ecosystem, depend of the network as a whole to survive, sharing its fate. An important aspect of the business ecosystem, which directly affects its success, is its overall health.

How to maintain the success of a certain business ecosystem? The key issue is to effectively create value within the ecosystem and to share this value with the other members. By trying to improve it continually, the odds of their own survival and prosperity increases. This strategy encourages potential new members to join it.

So, the question that remains is “How to improve the overall health of the business ecosystem?”. Feel free to help me answer that…