{"id":1261,"date":"2021-06-01T09:17:20","date_gmt":"2021-06-01T09:17:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/?p=1261"},"modified":"2021-06-01T09:17:21","modified_gmt":"2021-06-01T09:17:21","slug":"rule-10-engage-with-your-ecosystem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/2021\/06\/01\/rule-10-engage-with-your-ecosystem\/","title":{"rendered":"Rule 10: Engage with your ecosystem"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"
Photo by Alina Grubnyak on Unsplash<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Traditional business ecosystems were quite static. Partners stayed partners, competitors stayed competitors and your customers were the same as who they were yesterday. In a digital world, however, business ecosystems are in continuous flux. Your supplier becomes your competitor. You become your customer\u2019s competitor. You partner with companies that you never heard of a month ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are at least three patterns causing business ecosystems to \nundergo continuous change. First, digitalization often changes the \nbusiness model from transactional to continuous, eg subscription based. \nAs a result, the company providing the product wants to own the customer\n relationship as it simplifies the continuous delivery of value through,\n among others, software updates. This puts tension on the relationship \nwith the intermediate ecosystem partners, such as wholesalers, resellers\n and installers, as the product company is now jumping over them to \nreach the end customer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Second, digitalization is about software, data and artificial \nintelligence. When a new technology is introduced, companies often start\n to collaborate with partners they would never have connected with even a\n quarter earlier. These partners usually are smaller specialists with \ndedicated knowledge and expertise and the partnerships initially tend to\n be concerned with educating the company on the new technology. Later, \nthe company has to decide if the new technology is sufficiently critical\n to build up expertise inside the organization or if a strategic \npartnership suffices. Still, new partners disrupt the existing ecosystem\n as the new technology also affects the existing products, subsystems \nand functionalities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Third, although the saying \u201cdata is the new oil\u201d is missing the \npoint, data is an increasingly valuable artifact that can be monetized \nin unique ways. Especially when data is monetized with a secondary \ncustomer base, this can be quite disruptive to existing ecosystems for \nseveral reasons. First, the existing products are suddenly instrumented \nto collect data that has no relevance for the primary customer base, \nonly for the secondary one. Second, the funds from the secondary \ncustomer base can be used to subsidize products to the primary one, \ncausing a positive feedback cycle where an increasing primary customer \nbase results in more data and hence more revenue from the secondary one,\n allowing for more subsidizing, and so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The danger in these ecosystem transformations is that relationships \nwith existing partners as well as new ones get disrupted along the way \nas each company is looking out for its own interests rather than the \necosystem as a whole. Due to the disruption, the ecosystem may fall \napart and everyone loses. The uncomfortable truth is that while the new \nbusiness ecosystem is taking shape, the old one still generates the vast\n majority of the revenue. Getting cut out from that ecosystem will mean \nthe end of business for most companies out there. Consequently, you risk\n ending up in a situation where all ecosystem partners are keeping each \nother hostage and the ecosystem grows stale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, the key challenge is to achieve ambidexterity between maintaining\n the relations in the current ecosystem, developing the new ecosystem \nand helping your partners to co-evolve with you to new roles in the new \necosystem to avoid obsolescence in the old ecosystem and avoiding \nunacceptable disruption in the transition. The most effective way to do \nthis is by continuously engaging with your ecosystem. This allows you to\n detect changes early on and to see which partners are the most open to \nworking with you on transitioning. Of course, it also allows you to \ndetect when others are intending to change in a way that\u2019s detrimental \nto you. You can use this input to identify when the time is right for \nyou to reposition in your ecosystem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although business ecosystems have always evolved, digitalization accelerates the pace of change with orders of magnitude. To remain successful, you have to continuously engage with your ecosystem to identify challenges and changes, maintain positive relationships with partners, develop new relationships where necessary and identify when the time is right to transition from one state to the next in the ecosystem. As the saying goes, the only constant is change and the only companies that don\u2019t change are dead ones. And who wants to go the way of the dinosaurs?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To get more insights earlier, sign up for my newsletter at <\/em>jan@janbosch.com<\/em><\/a> or follow me on<\/em> janbosch.com\/blog<\/em><\/a>, LinkedIn (<\/em>linkedin.com\/in\/janbosch<\/em><\/a>), Medium<\/a> or Twitter (<\/em>@JanBosch<\/em><\/a>).<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Traditional business ecosystems were quite static. Partners stayed partners, competitors stayed competitors and your customers were the same as who they were yesterday. In a digital world, however, business ecosystems are in continuous flux. Your supplier becomes your competitor. You become your customer\u2019s competitor. You partner with companies that you never heard of a month … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5,8,10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1261"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1261"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1261\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1263,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1261\/revisions\/1263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}