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?
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?
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.
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
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.
Most companies still underestimate what “ecosystem” really means and why they need to go deeper into the causes of their Ecosystems not delivering what they would want. .
They think it’s a partner program. Or a platform. Or a digital initiative. Or a slide with circles and arrows.
But here’s the shift that’s already happening — quietly, structurally, and faster than most leaders realise:
Your business is no longer operating in a market.It’s operating in an ecosystem.
Scale logic rests on a clear set of assumptions: inputs are replicable, processes are stable, and growth comes from doing more of a proven thing with greater efficiency. These assumptions are well-suited to manufacturing, standardised service delivery, and transactional platforms with high volume and low variance. They have produced enormous value in those contexts.
But they embed a hidden constraint: the system produces more output without necessarily becoming more capable. A scaled organisation is a bigger version of itself. It is not a structurally different one. The growth is additive. The returns are, at best, linear — and increasingly sub-linear as competitive imitation narrows differentiation and regulatory, environmental, and labour costs compress margins.
Where scale logic fails ecosystems
Ecosystems are not linear value chains with more participants. They are systems in which the primary assets — relationships, knowledge, trust, combinatorial capability — behave differently from physical or transactional assets. They appreciate through use. They generate network effects. They produce emergent value that no single participant designed or controls.
The hardest ceilings are the ones you approach while everything around you still looks like progress.
Siemens has built something real. Real industrial reach. Real data gravity. Real presence across manufacturing, energy, mobility and healthcare. The most credible industrial ecosystem of its generation – built over decades, not months, on relationships and infrastructure that competitors cannot simply replicate.
