When we use the term in this book, we use it to refer to much deeper connections between businesses—alliances that are about collectively creating and sharing value in the best interests of the customer.引自 Introduction: The Age of Ecosystems 1
You might wonder how ecosystem companies differ from conglomerates. We’ll tackle this question more fully in Chapter 1, but for now, the short answer is that ecosystems are centered on customer needs—whereas conglom- erates are not necessarily. As we’ll see, there are different ways of being an ecosystem player. Some involve collaborating with select partners to build your business across sector borders in order to meet customer needs in a particular category or set of categories. Others involve working closely with many partners or facilitating a large platform on which other players can come together. The core concept, though, is that players are crossing sector borders in the service of meeting a set of customer needs holistically.引自 Introduction: The Age of Ecosystems 1
Ecosystems are particularly effective—and attractive to customers—when they are able to solve critical pain points with tai- lored solutions. In other words, if an ecosystem can help consumers through the most arduous step on their journey, they will be more likely to trust the broader ecosystem with the rest of their needs.引自 Introduction: The Age of Ecosystems 1
Today, although the list remains constantly in flux, you are likely to find that a signifi- cant majority of those top ten companies are ecosystem players— companies that defy easy categorization because they work in concert with a community of partners to create value propositions that span sector boundaries. 引自 Introduction: The Age of Ecosystems 1
We believe that in the coming decades, the fundamental structure of the global economy will be recast into an entirely new shape. This carries a number of important consequences, the most significant being that a nearly incomprehensible amount of value is at stake.引自 Introduction: The Age of Ecosystems 1
This integrated ecosystem economy is com- ing whether you are ready or not—in fact, it’s already here—and failing to act would be an enormous missed opportunity. There is a new set of rules, a new set of incentives—a whole new game to play. Continuing to play by the old rules will mean not only missing out on the rewards of the ecosystem economy, but facing disintermediation, disaggregation, commoditization, and invisibility—what we call the four horsemen of the apocalypse. The ecosystem economy opens enormous opportunities for creative business offerings, but also brings great danger.引自 Introduction: The Age of Ecosystems 1
The ecosystem economy demands that we rework our entire approach to competition, and that we do it as a team—from the board and the CEO on down. It requires that we transform our organizations on a most basic level—that we rethink who we are as a company, where we compete, who we partner with, what value propo- sitions we offer, how we execute our plays, how we create value in the broader ecosystem economy, and how we capture some of that value.引自 Introduction: The Age of Ecosystems 1
Within the emerging world of ecosystems, the goal is to own your customers, to follow and guide them on their journey and build a model that serves their needs at critical junctures.引自 1 Sparks of Magic... 15
Indeed, the conglomerates of the 1960s and 1970s (and earlier) prefigured today’s ecosystems and share a few important commonalities with them: both grow by extending their offerings to meet customer needs and by expanding into new lines of business, sometimes through acquiring external companies, and sometimes by organically growing the business.
But at the same time, what’s happening today is fundamentally different—in several important ways. First, in many cases, a conglomerate’s component parts often did not fit together naturally; that is to say, they were not combined with the intention that they would work together harmoniously. Rather, they came together in most cases only because of the capital advantages of consolidation—or for other, somewhat ill-conceived reasons. Many conglomerates would take on entirely new businesses with very little customer overlap, or with few opportunities for creating synergies with their existing offerings. This was the so-called firm-as-portfolio model, in which a conglomerate’s many divisions and acquisitions were seen as analogous to an investor’s portfolio. A second important difference between conglomerates and ecosystems is their emphasis on collaboration—while conglomerates were content to do most things on their own, today’s ecosystem players rely heavily on external, third-party companies or contractors to develop products and services on a common platform in the best interest of serving customer needs. And third, ecosystems tend to have business models that are quite different from those of conglomerates. While conglomerates generally relied on traditional business models, the most successful ecosystem players today favor a model of growing the pie in collaboration with other players and then sharing the value they have collectively created.引自 1 Sparks of Magic... 15
But by the 1980s, a confluence of trends was putting the conglomerate model under increasing pressure. Global markets were becoming far more efficient, especially with investors diversifying their portfolios of investments. The same was true for talent—as access to talent became easier globally, the market for talent became much more transparent and efficient. At the same time, some of the disadvantages of large conglomerates became more apparent: it turned out that managing a multitude of different divisions with different needs, goals, and motivations brought operational and organizational challenges that were extremely difficult to tackle under a broad conglomerate structure. Very often, being bigger and more complex meant tolerating more and more inefficiency.引自 1 Sparks of Magic... 15