Understanding business ecosystems

“The winners in ecosystem-driven markets will not be those that scale fastest or spend the most on AI, but those that govern interdependence most deliberately.”

Business ecosystems are redefining how organizations create value, yet many executives are still making critical decisions without a clear framework. This report provides one.

Drawing on the latest academic research and a proprietary survey of 275 senior leaders with direct responsibility for business ecosystems across 12 industries, it offers evidence-based guidance for navigating ecosystem strategy and avoiding the mistakes that undermine performance.

The distinction at the heart of ecosystem strategy

At the heart of the report is a distinction many organizations overlook: platforms and ecosystems are not the same. Platforms reduce friction by connecting parties. Ecosystems coordinate cooperation among independent actors whose contributions must work together to create value. Many ecosystems operate on top of a platform, but they are more than platforms alone. Confusing the two can lead to misaligned governance, wasted investment, and avoidable failure.

Preview the report

Explore the key insights, framework, and recommendations before downloading the full report.

Reshaping executive decision-making

The report examines how ecosystems are reshaping executive decision-making across three critical dimensions:

• Value creation: Ecosystems generate returns through coordinated interdependence, not simple scale.
• Governance: The concentration of coordination power creates exposures that traditional partnerships do not.
• Sovereignty: Geopolitical fragmentation is turning cross-border data flows into strategic vulnerabilities that can force restructuring regardless of performance.

Building resilient and effective ecosystem strategies

The report also explores areas where the evidence is now strong enough to guide strategy, including governance and orchestration design, platform dynamics and complementor strategy, innovation and bottleneck risk, institutional context and cross-border challenges, AI as a shifting control point, and sustainability as a source of weakest-link interdependence.

The report also challenges conventional wisdom in three areas that increasingly shape ecosystem success: measuring ecosystem health, responding to data sovereignty requirements, and managing governance transitions without destabilizing the system.

As ecosystems become a strategic necessity rather than a choice, the key challenge for leaders is no longer whether to participate, but how to govern the interdependencies they create.

The report concludes with six diagnostic questions and evidence-based principles to help leaders distinguish platform challenges from ecosystem challenges and make better strategic decisions.

The central insight is clear: ecosystem success depends not on scaling fastest or investing most aggressively in AI, but on governing interdependence more deliberately than rivals.

Download the full report.

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