Building the Capabilities for Ecosystem Operational Design
Category Archives: Dynamic Business Ecosystems
Learn why static models fail and how dynamic ecosystems enable continuous sensing, rapid adaptation, and real-time decision-making. Build the dynamic capabilities needed for 2026 and beyond.
Applying Four Practical Tests for Ecosystem Accountability
When we try to manage relationships across organizational boundaries using traditional, hierarchy-bound tools, the line runs out right where we need it most.
In a recent piece,Accountability at the Edge: Design Principles for Ecosystems Beyond Hierarchy, I explored why traditional, single-name accountability breaks down at the boundary. Moving across organizational lines requires a fundamental design shift—moving away from static compliance and adopting dynamic verbs like push, convene, and adapt.
Explaining this is vital, but how do you know if your team or ecosystem is actually doing the work?
Events are running ahead of you. You have that feeling you are falling behind, competitively. You are not seeing your market the same, it is changing in front of your eyes. You are being faced by external events that seem to leave you “flat footed”.
Catching this early enough isn’t mainly a technology question, and it isn’t solved by one team working harder to watch more dashboards. It’s a question of organisational design — specifically, whether the way you’re structured to sense a shift is still built for a world where most of the useful signal sits inside your own four walls.
We are living in an event-driven world now, whether or not any given organisation has caught up to that fact. Things don’t move on your planning cycle anymore. A partner reprices without warning. A regulation shifts before your working group has finished its first draft. A competitor reconfigures its offer, and by the time your team has fully understood what happened, two more moves have already followed it. Reaction timehas become critical. The world moves in events; most organisations are still built to move on schedules.
That mismatch is what recognition actually depends on here — not “are things changing,” which everyone already knows, but “are we still finding out about change on a timetable, when the change itself doesn’t wait for one.”
I built the Nine Dimensions comparative diagnostic to evaluate the differences between organisations on their Ecosystem journey to gain both insights and potential gaps that might want to be filled, hopefully with my help.
Recently I undertook a set of focused evaluations on different Healthcare organizations- Novartis, Roche, Bayer, Royal Philips and Siemens Healthineers for understanding their present Ecosystem position.
My next step was to extend this diagnostic approach across into other sectors as well, in wanting to establish a more updated “universal” diagnostic tool. This post takes me into the Industrial sector and the e-commerce one
So,stepping out of the work achieved in the Heathcare sector I have actually re-tested* against a group of Industrial and e-commerce offering marketplaces connecting businesses and buyers worldwide. I chose Siemens AG, Schneider Electric, Salesforce and Alibaba.
*Why re-tested? In much earlier work on Ecosystem validations I used a different nine dimensions, more general-purpose instrument: it was good for establishing “does this company have ecosystem architecture at all,” weak for discriminating between companies that are all somewhere in the ecosystem-emerging middle or their own ecosystem understanding. It helped me learn and relate as I was building my IIBE blueprint
This revised Nine Dimension is a sharper, more comparative instrument because it was built (or refined) under the pressure of actually needing to differentiate real companies against each other, not designed in the abstract.
This was a test to run pulling current evidence on each company’s actual ecosystem/partner model. In this specific diagnostic I had expected a cleaner split between Siemens and Schneider and Salesforce and Alibaba as these two are regarded as more mature in their Ecosystem approaches
If You’re a Healthcare Diagnostics Company, Here’s What the IIBE Diagnostic Actually Means for You
You’re in a tough position:
You have strong diagnostic technology.
You face entrenched incumbents with distribution power.
You’re being shut out of established channels.
Building your own ecosystem feels expensive and slow.
Joining someone else’s ecosystem feels risky or unclear.
You’re unsure where the leverage actually is.
This is exactly the kind of situation the *IIBE Diagnostic is built for.
Let me show you how as someone who feels the pressure of entrenched competitors, rising costs, and the uncertainty of whether to build, join, or partner into an ecosystem. I’ll answer in a way that is clear, strategic, and grounded in the IIBE architecture
*IIBE stands for Intelligent Integrated Business Ecosystem – the architectural approach to Ecosystems.
1. The Diagnostic Gives You a Structural X‑Ray of Your Strategic Position
Most corporate boards are blind to the fact that they are quietly accumulating Enterprise Option Debt that their balance sheets cannot pay back in future times, when needed. Conventional accounting looks backwards to measure past performance but it is structurally incapable of assessing future survival.
This is a ecosystem diagnostic of Royal Philips that points towards a potentially dangerous, invisible convergence gap where there is growing risk their strategic choices are contracting and exposure might be spiking in a trajectory that needs questioning. Not by external sources but by internal ones capable of making their own assessments of this Optionality and Volatility laid out here.
Asset Entrapment, Invisible Capital Erosion and Valuation disconnects are needs system-level addressing in declining optionality, unhedged volatility and a growing convergence gap in the public narrative or market need and operational reality.
A verifiable public baseline and a qualitative concern threshold, read together through the IIBE Optionality and Volatility lens — and why the gap between them is the most important strategic finding in this series
That is what the Optionality and Volatility lens reads, for Philips at this specific moment, what it surfaces is more consequential than any single quarterly metric — because it describes not where the organisation is but what it is still capable of becoming, and what stands between the current trajectory and that possibility.
Fourth and final in a series. The first asked whether Philips is building an ecosystem or borrowing its language. The second asked what architecture a genuine system-shaping role requires. The third put Philips, Siemens Healthineers, and GE HealthCare through the nine IIBE dimensions side by side. This piece applies the Optionality and Volatility lens promised at the end of that diagnostic series.
This piece introduces a methodological distinction that matters for how the findings should be read that often presents a radically different story on an organization. Reading time 15 minutes
This is third in a series. The first piece asked whether Philips is building an ecosystem or borrowing its language. The second asked what architecture a genuine system-shaping role requires.
This piece puts Philips, Siemens Healthineers, and GE HealthCare through the same nine-dimension IIBE assessment side by side — asking what a like-for-like architectural read reveals that a quarterly results comparison cannot.
One critical issue to ask : This looks beyond comparing scores at the harder structural question underneath as we compare: has any of them actually built an ecosystem, or are all three still running sophisticated versions of the same bilateral sell?
This is about a 15 minute read.
In this nine IIBE dimensions we look across rivals to see differences and opportunities offering competitive positioning and opportunity points and where it places Philips in its approaches.
Royal Philips- Shaping or Being Shaped for its MedTech future?
We need to ask a broader question here: what does it actually take for an organisation to shape the system it operates in, rather than simply adapt to it?
Philips is not just the subject of the analysis. It is the case that makes the wider architectural question visible.
The Philips case matters because it shows the difference between speaking in ecosystem terms and building for ecosystem behavior. The lesson goes beyond one company: many organizations want ecosystem leadership, but few redesign their operating logic to support it.
The diagnosis is clear: Philips is speaking at system level while still operating largely at company level. That matters not only for Philips, but for any organization that aspires to ecosystem leadership without yet redesigning its architecture to match.
This second part of a series that builds on the Philips analysis following on from the first article: Royal Philips: Metaphor or operating logic?
This article raises some of those tougher questions when you are building collaborative Ecosystems.
Appreciating Assets as a new Ecosystem accounting class
Current accounting fails ecosystems. Traditional accounting assumes assets wear out, value declines with use and treats relationships as expense, knowledge is seen as overheads, coordination is a cost and trust is intangible and is left untracked.
Ecosystem assets are the capital class that becomes more valuable every time it is used. Investing in them is not a cost – it is the foundation of compounding advantage. In some ways applying this logic offers a real breakthrough, it reframes the entire investment conversation in ecosystems – and you can turn compounding from a metaphor into a management system.
It is time for us to consider treating Ecosystem assets as an appreciating capital asset class – because they grow stronger through use – and our accounting must shift from measuring cost/return to measuring what is being built and how fast it appreciates.
*** Depreciation logic was built for assets to die.
