Starting here in any Diagnostic for Building Ecosystems
Executive Briefing: Most business ecosystems hit a growth ceiling because they remain stuck at the problem-recognition level. Enterprise leaders recognize the system is resisting them, yet they attempt to solve boundary friction using traditional partner management tools.
Moving beyond platform activity requires an explicit Ecosystem Architecture built on three structural requirements: an explicit blueprint, a shared ecosystem grammar, and distributed network intelligence.
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.
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
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
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.
Where GE Vernova Should Start: The Proving Grounds for Ecosystem Leadership”
In my previous analysis, I argued that GE Vernova’s next challenge isn’t technology — it’s architecture. The company has the assets to lead the energy transition, but not yet the structural operating logic to orchestrate the ecosystem it depends on.
This post builds on my first GE Vernova piece and deepens the architectural argument. I’ve been analysing the structural shifts shaping industrial and energy ecosystems, and GE Vernova came into sharp focus as I compared the major players. It’s not a critique — it’s an architectural perspective on where GE Vernova could lead the energy transition if the right top‑layer ecosystem logic is put in place.
The natural question that follows is: Where should GE Vernova start?
We are in need of the supporting architecture of the AI era, not simply advocating ecosystems or simply using AI within the one organization. The value is in collaborations within networks that combine Ecosystems and AI.
The next competitive advantage will not come from AI capability alone. It will come from designing the intelligence architecture in which AI operates and seeks collaboration
When the road to sovereign capacity leaves you with nowhere left to turn.
Northvolt didn’t just run out of money. It ran out of ways to change direction.
For a few years, Northvolt carried far more than a balance sheet. It carried Europe’s story about itself: that the continent could still build strategic industries, secure its own energy future, and turn circularity from a slide into a system. Then, in less than two years, that story went from European flagship to bankruptcy proceedings and asset sales. The mission didn’t suddenly become wrong. The architecture ran out of room to move when the future stopped cooperating.
This is not a post about Northvolt’s management. It is an article about what happens when ecosystem ambition scales faster than the operating system needed to keep it coherent – especially when optionality and volatility stop being theoretical and start showing up in the numbers. In plain terms, that is just how much room to move your design still leaves you, and how quickly the world forces you to use it. Looked at through that lens, Northvolt is a textbook case of ecosystem entrapment: a design that gradually traded away future freedom for speed and scale.
When the story still worked
On paper, Northvolt did many of the “right” things.
We have not had the tools or comprehensive methodologies to find out what is happening when your Ecosystem shows signs of stress or even collapsing. In this Business Case Study of Northvolt AG using the IIBE Lens approach you can achieve this understanding.
Traditional analysis of the health of any Business Ecosystem can miss so much. In our constructing the Ecosystem IIBE Lens we found the Northvolt business case as a really revealing contrast case for the IIBE and how we learned to evolve it from this. We wanted to show what happened when the Ecosystem ignored the multiple signs of collapsing, and ask if these can be recognized as contributing symptoms earlier?
We believe we can provide the answers through the IIBE Lens
This post is part of a two week series where Week 1 established where the four industrial leaders sit today in their Ecosystem health; Week 2 shows what collapse looks like when the architecture fails in a specific case, Northvolt.
This post is an extended Business Case study of Northvolt AB- it provides some valuable lessons on the management of Ecosystems operating in complex, challenging and often volatile conditions rapidly seeking competitive advantage at speed and scale.
A time for re-learning the Power of Ecosystems and Repositioned Platforms
There Are Times When Engineering Excellence Becomes a Constraint and that is what Energy and Industrial Leaders Are Quietly Learning About Ecosystems. They are becoming more constrained by what they have or how they operate.
Across energy and industrial markets, a paradox is emerging.
The companies best equipped to lead the next phase of the energy transition and industrial transformation — Siemens AG, Siemens Energy, Schneider Electric, ABB, GE Vernova, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries — are also the ones most constrained by their own success.
They are faced with difficult decisions to be made to move their Ecosystems forward. They are all facing different levels of entrapment and need to carefully figure what it is they need to do.
