Category Archives: Ecosystem Design and Thinking

Driving your Business in the Ecosystem Era: Why Executives Need the Keys, Not the Blueprint

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Driving the IIBE Car as your Architectural Design

1. Executive Briefing

The Tension: Executive teams recognize their legacy business models are buckling under market friction, yet every attempt to build an ecosystem stalls under a mountain of complex blueprints, system schematics, and theoretical frameworks.

The Cause: Most ecosystem advisors attempt to teach the C-suite how to tune the engine transmission instead of handing them a precision-engineered vehicle ready to drive across volatile multi-partner terrain.

The Outcome: The IIBE Operational Engine decouples architectural engineering from daily leadership—providing the pre-built scaffolding, adaptive governance, and dynamic sensing required for executives to focus entirely on driving compounding growth from Point A to Point C.

The Intelligent Integrated Business Ecosystem (IIBE) is an architecture for diagnosing, designing and orchestrating ecosystems of independent partners. It combines human meaning, AI sensing and ecosystem flow, so that purpose, value, governance and data work together as the ecosystem evolves.

It is built for situations where partners are independent and cannot simply be directed. The IIBE reads whether an ecosystem holds together, shows where leverage and dependence sit, and sets out an ordered path to act on what it finds.

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Are You Winning At Ecosystems, Not as a Single Entity

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Charting a pathway of collaboration to a successful Ecosystem

The New Competitive Reality: Winning as an Ecosystem, Not a Single Entity

Executive Briefing: For decades, market leadership meant building the strongest isolated company in the room—best product, best sales force, lowest price.

Today, established market leaders are losing deals to competitors with inferior single-entity technology.

The ground has shifted: incumbents are competing as single entities against rivals operating as assembled multi-actor collaboration hubs.

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The Strategic Rupture of Legacy Industrial Logic

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Executive Briefing: When encountering strategic bottlenecks, corporate leadership instinctively asks: “How do we scale this?” But applying 20th-century industrial scale logic to multi-actor ecosystems creates systemic failure.

Scale logic was designed for depreciating physical assets and linear processes. Ecosystems operate on compounding network assets that appreciate through use. Attempting to do “more of the same, faster” under legacy scale logic actively undermines ecosystem performance.

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Facing Up To The Platform Fallacy: Hitting the Invisible Growth Wall

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Recognizing the limitations within one organization

Executive Briefing: Industrial giants—from Siemens and Schneider Electric to Novartis, Roche, and Maersk—continue to pour billions into digital platforms, developer portals, and API marketplaces. Yet, despite massive capital expenditure, compounding network value stalls.

This stagnation occurs because platforms taught leadership the wrong strategic logic. Platforms enforce centralized gatekeeping, ownership of flows, and aggressive value capture. True ecosystems require decentralized alignment, dynamic orchestration, and reciprocal value creation.

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Beyond the Edge: 4 Practical Tests for Ecosystem Accountability

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Accountability Beyond the Edge

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?

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The crisis being faced in Precision Manufacturing in Germany- providing a different proposition

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I received this “I have a friend who runs a small – medium sized business highly specialised in high precision machinery for one critical part of a car, including EV’s here in Germany. The forecast for the car future in Germany worries him as he in a niche provider, content today with what he does but sees a difficult future. He needs options and wonders how he can “break out” of his single business rather locked into the Car Industry. What would the Intelligent Integrated Business Ecosystem (IIBE) do for him? 

I refer back to Bob Gravestijns really probing article “Germany’s industrial memory loss: Why an engineering engine is losing the ecosystem play” to help explain how a country can still have world-class firms, skills and institutions, yet begin to lose the architecture that allows them to learn, align and adapt together.

So let me speak to your friend’s situation tuned to the reality of German precision manufacturing, the automotive transition, and the ecosystem pressures he’s feeling. 

This will show exactly what the IIBE would do for him, and why it matters now, not later. 

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Building the Sensing You Don’t Yet Have Requires A Networked approach

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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.

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Evaluating Actual Business Ecosystems Using the Nine Dimension Diagnostic

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Applying the Diagnostic

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

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Novartis Has Built Two Ecosystems. It Hasn’t Connected Them Yet. They Should.

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The Converging Forces We Need To Connect Up

Vas Narasimhan (the CEO, Novartis) has named it directly: becoming the number one partner in the technology ecosystem is one of Novartis’s four digital strategic pillars. That is not aspirational language dropped into an investor deck. It is explicit ecosystem intent at CEO level, and it is rare in global pharma.

Novartis has acted on it. Two remarkable architectures now exist inside the company, each sophisticated enough to be a case study on its own.

I took a look at Novatis and its intent though a different approach here, exploring the results from the Intelligent Integrated Business Ecosystem (IIBE) and raising some fairly important Ecosystem building questions on Novartis, based on my analysis as part of the Healthcare research undertaken

So these two remarkable architectures seem to have so much value left on the table. There seems much to do on taking these to a very different level

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Evaluating Bayer and Roche for their future Ecosystem potential

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Starting here in any Diagnostic for Building Ecosystems

Within my work on Ecosystems a significant amount of this is through Diagnostics that leads to Discovery.

Over the past month or so I have been focusing on the Healthcare section and through a number of my diagnostic tools assessed GE Healthcare, Siemens Healthineers, Royal Philips, Novartis, Bayer and Roche.

Why Healthcare? If ever the potential for applying Ecosystem thinking and design it would be in Healthcare. Yet there is so much fragmentation, current relationship constraints and design obstacles to. resolve.

I have posted observations on Siemens Healthineers (post here) and Royal Philips recently. Specifically for Royal Philips I did a very extensive Business Case outline over four posts as I took a broader range of my diagnostic tools to apply to them

Here I am focusing on Bayer and Roche, specially through my Nine-dimensional diagnostic. They aim to offer structural truths. They exist whether the organization acknowledges them. The diagnostic does not create them, it makes them visible. The ones outlined here are not part of the total evaluation undertaken, they are an initial snapshot that needs some more detailed input to gain a more definitive result.

The importance within the IIBE is the sequence, handoff, linkage and movements. In this case the nine components shown are here in these results more “stand alone”, indicative of opportunities for organizations to focus and evaluate each component, to recognise the needs to improve or spot the constraints.

The results for Bayer and Roche offered surprising and different results in the stages they are at in Ecosystem design progress

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