This is written more as a provocation showing the use the IIBE Lens for Ecosystem Management has hidden value . It can uncover uncomfortable truths.
In a series of four posts provided over on my other dedicated Ecosystem Design Hub site outlining the value of adopting an IIBE Lens you will see how different industrial and energy organizations are evaluated and assessed using this approach from understanding the IIBE Lens through to positioning positions taken on Ecosystem offerings, to how optionality and volatility can radically alter propositions to impact their future.
Business ecosystems provide a real, sustainable and significant competitive advantage by shifting a company to a higher level of collaborative, networked value creation. Instead of just selling a single product, you are selling a “connected solution” built and supported by a web of partners, providing greater value and outcomes as a result.
This post is deliberately provocative. It is written for executives who suspect that their current ecosystem narrative may not survive the next phase of industrial and energy-system change.
Others in Banking, Healthcare, Software provision etc.,also can gain real insights, not to ignore or feel this does not apply to them, simply because it does.
Equally those looking to disrupt or are considering Ecosystems as a pathway to new growth need to recognise the value of evaluating different competitive positioning.
Through the use of the Integrated Interconnected Business Ecosystem (IIBE) blueprint it is designed to support the move towards a collaborative ecosystem environment for incumbents, disruptors and those catching up on the recognition of the value of ecosystems within their business.
Most industrial leaders still believe they are competing on technology, digitalisation, or execution speed. They are not. The real competition has already shifted to ecosystem fitness — the ability to orchestrate a system others depend on, invest into, and cannot easily leave.
To Build and Scale Business Ecosystems over on the www.ecosystems4innovating.com site I have taken four major industrial and energy players and compared their Ecosystem approaches, maturity, capabiities and ambitions to grow through a more connected positioning. It provides some interesting reading on the different approaches within Ecosystem management.
Why Ecosystem Completeness, Not Technology, Now Determines Advantage and there is lots of opportunity to change the Industrial Ecosystem Race.
The ability to understand Ecosystem positioning we have developed the IIBE Lens.
Using the Intelligent & Integrated Business Ecosystem (IIBE) Lens, this comparison of Siemens AG, Schneider Electric, ABB, and GE Vernova exposes an uncomfortable truth:
Some ecosystems are already structurally advantaged. Others are still mistaking partnership activity for ecosystem strength.
That is where the Intelligent Business Ecosystem (IIBE) Lens comes in. Unlike conventional frameworks, the IIBE Lens provides a rich, practical, and actionable way to evaluate ecosystems — revealing their strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities in a way that executives can act on immediately.
This is not a framework explanation. It is a value-focused comparison showing why certain ecosystem positions compound advantage — and why others create hidden constraints.
How the IIBE Lens Is Applied Here (What a Client Actually Cares About)
This comparison focuses on outcomes that matter to boards, CEOs, and ecosystem leaders:
- Can this ecosystem become a dependency for customers and partners — or is it optional?
- Does the platform reduce orchestration burden — or shift it onto the client?
- Is ecosystem participation economically and operationally compelling — or merely encouraged?
- Is orchestration institutionalised — or dependent on personalities and initiatives?
- Does the ecosystem fit the structural realities of its priority markets?
Optionality (future choice) and Volatility (system behaviour under stress) are deliberately excluded and given a dedicated focus in the final post of the series — because their inclusion reframes the winners and exposes internal constraints. It is where eventual winners and losers will be decided.
Todays ecosystem positioning may be radically different in the future. Industrial and Energy Ecosystems are still evolving.
Siemens AG: The Ecosystem Others Must Learn to Compete Against
Position: The current benchmark — and the hardest to catch.
Siemens has crossed a critical threshold: its ecosystem is no longer an advantage; it is becoming a structural moat. The company has moved beyond “partner strategies” into deliberately architected industrial operating systems.
What makes Siemens dangerous to competitors is not scale, but ecosystem gravity. Platforms such as Xcelerator are designed to absorb complexity that customers and partners cannot — lifecycle integration, digital twins, interoperability across domains.
This dramatically lowers orchestration costs for customers while increasing dependence on the Siemens environment. Importantly, Siemens does this without closing the system. Openness exists — but on Siemens’ architectural terms.
Internally, ecosystem orchestration is institutionalised. Governance, incentives, capital allocation, and leadership signalling are aligned. This means the ecosystem compounds even when market conditions shift. The issues in the future will depend on how they handle optionality.
Reframe Siemens: From “Benchmark” to “Constrained Reference System” Why? I deal with that (and volatility) in the last post of the short series over on my other site, as these constraints can build up.
Stop treating Siemens as a universal benchmark. Treat it as a reference system with embedded constraints. This is one of Siemens biggest challenges ahead of itself.
Siemens’ ecosystem strength is real — but it is conditional, not absolute. This alone reframes Siemens from “the one to copy” to “the one to interrogate.”
IIBE Reality: Siemens is already operating where others are still aspiring to be. They can fully capture a strong positionto act as a digital orchestrator, integrating software, IoT, and grid management but others are constraining them as they catch up.
Schneider Electric: Winning by Making Ecosystems Impossible to Ignore
Position: The most commercially dangerous ecosystem.
Schneider Electric proves a critical point many executives miss: ecosystems do not win by being elegant — they win by being unavoidable.
EcoStruxure is not the deepest or most architecturally ambitious platform in this group. It is, however, one of the most adoptable. Schneider relentlessly removes friction for customers, integrators, and partners who are under pressure to deliver energy efficiency, resilience, and decarbonisation now.
The result is ecosystem pull. Customers choose Schneider not because they want an ecosystem, but because they cannot meet regulatory, operational, or sustainability demands without one.
Schneider’s trade-off is intentional: speed and clarity over cross-domain system elegance. That trade-off is paying off commercially. The tighter domain focus and modularity gives it a distinctive edge. This can come under threat if those competitors that operate in their domains shift to a greater ecosystem customer engagement. All three GE, ABM and Siemens AG can make inroads here
IIBE Reality: Schneider shows that ecosystem advantage comes from forcing adoption through relevance, not persuasion. Does a more customer-centric approach eventually win the day? Blends hardware distribution products with software intelligence platforms
ABB: The Hidden Cost of Federated Excellence
Position: The most misleading ecosystem story — strong parts, weak whole.
ABB’s ecosystem challenge is not capability, investment, or talent. It is self-inflicted fragmentation.
ABB operates powerful local ecosystems around electrification, automation, and robotics. But these ecosystems rarely reinforce each other. The result is a portfolio of strong offerings without a compounding system effect.
Customers buy ABB for engineering trust. They do not yet rely on ABB as an ecosystem environment. Participation remains transactional, and orchestration burden frequently sits with the client or integrator. Portfolio Governance and enabling this will be a future test.
The risk is subtle but serious: competitors with weaker products but stronger ecosystems will increasingly displace ABB at the system level.
- Fragmentation may become advantage in high-diversity environments
- Its weakness today may become optionality tomorrow
IIBE Reality: ABB is paying an invisible tax for not integrating its ecosystem logic. They have a very strong hardware anchor with growing software orchestration layer with their ABB Ability™ platform for energy management, predictive maintenance, and IoT integration.
GE Vernova: Purpose Without an Ecosystem Engine
Position: Strategically necessary, ecosystem-constrained.
GE Vernova is essential to the energy transition — but importance does not equal ecosystem power.
Its ecosystem ambition is clear in intent but constrained in execution. Partnerships exist, yet they function primarily as project enablers rather than as a scalable, repeatable system.
Platform coherence remains fragmented across energy domains, and ecosystem value is rarely designed end-to-end. Customers engage GE Vernova because they must — not because the ecosystem makes it easier.
Recent restructuring has improved focus but reduced discretionary ecosystem investment. This creates a strategic paradox: the markets GE Vernova serves need ecosystems most, yet its ecosystem maturity lags. One area that shows a promising integrated approach is in Grid Software.
- Ecosystem-light today. They need to get their platform mojo back but differently
- But grid transition may force new ecosystem forms that others cannot fully control due to geogrpahic and historical ties and energy security issues growing constantly.
This reframes catch-up as contextual leapfrogging, not imitation. GE Vernova needs to re-address its Ecosystem and Platform approach fairly soon
IIBE Reality: GE Vernova risks being indispensable — but not dominant. It will be interesting to see how they move from their historically hardware-heavy (turbines, generators) into their growing software/digital layer via GridOS and ADMS platforms. Their software platforms are growing, but adoption slower than hardware dominance. How they tackle this might be through a more cohesive Ecosystem integration
The Real Differentiator: Ecosystem Power, Not Ecosystem Activity
Let’s be explicit:
- Siemens has built ecosystem power that compounds.
- Schneider Electric has built ecosystem pull that converts.
- ABB has built ecosystem assets that do not yet reinforce.
- GE Vernova has built ecosystem intent without its necessary engine.
The difference is not ambition. It is orchestration discipline under internal constraints. The choice, going forward is how much each of these value the connected partners for their business
Why This Matters to Clients — Right Now
If you are not Siemens or Schneider, this comparison is not academic. Do you “fold” your business into others, who have pioneered, invested and built their Ecosystem and Platforms or can you seperate yourself in clever, strategically differentated ways? Without doubt you can.
It raises uncomfortable client questions that need to be answered, that is where we come in:
- Is our ecosystem optional to customers — or structurally relied upon?
- Where are we pushing orchestration cost onto partners instead of absorbing it?
- Which internal constraints are preventing ecosystem integration?
- Are we building future advantage — or defending current relevance?
We have tested this IIBE Lens
- tested it across nine+ materially different ecosystem realities
- stress-tested it under volatility, regulation, capital intensity, and turnaround
- evolved the methodology based on diagnostic failure signals (Northvolt)
Industry-Specific Multi-Company Comparisons and building….
- Energy & Utilities: Enel, Siemens Energy, Schneider Electric, ABB, Northvolt
- Industrial & Manufacturing: Honeywell, Siemens AG, Mitsubishi, John Deere, Hitachi
- Technology & Platforms: Salesforce, Alibaba, Stackit
Recognizing Risk, Exporing Opportunities, Resolving Expensive Mistakes
Diagnostic failure is essential to recognize early one. These questions become unavoidable once Volatility and Optionality are introduced — because they expose where ecosystems fracture under stress and where late movers can still catch up. That is a critical part of the IIBE lens, as it shows vulnerability and opportunty spaces.
“When Volatility and Optionality are introduced, the ranking changes — not because leaders collapse, but because constraints surface.”
Specifically:
- Siemens: strength → rigidity risk and flexible adoption
- Schneider: focus → adaptive leverage and accelerating integrated solutions
- ABB: fragmentation → latent optionality and harnessing hardware and software
- GE Vernova: constraint → forced reinvention and integration needs
And that is where:
- Other industy and energy providers see where they can still win
- Leaders see what they must unlearn if they can!
- Our Diagnostics → Design → Activation loop becomes essential, not optional
That shift — from static comparison to dynamic pressure — is discussed across the series over on the www.ecosystem4innovating.com site in a series of posts.
The other important issue to consider is Ecosystem Entrapment
Ecosystem Entrapement occurs when an organisation continues to perform, but its ecosystem configuration increasingly limits strategic choice, adaptability, and reconfiguration- often as a result of early design, investments made, legacy positioning and partner decisions.
Energy and Industry can feel entrapement earlier than most.
Within Energy and Industry they can be constrained by asset-heavy, long investment cycles, dependence on deep partner interdependence and are highly shaped by regulation, standards and installed logic. So when they build ecosystems they embed them into physical, contractual and ogvernance reality.
Exposure risks from Entrapment can occur:
- inability to pivot when markets shift
- rising coordination and governance costs
- declining leverage despite scale
- increasing fragility under stress
- erosion of learning advntage
These are future risks born from present constraints
A reflection here: “Many ecosystems weren’t designed to fail (clearly)- they were born too early, before the cost of constraint was fully understood.” The value of investing in a IIBE Lens evaluation, it gives a different language, provides a new clarity and early recognition that provides a ecosystem risk analysis to add different thinking to long-term constraint implications to be understood to reduce trapped value.
Explore the client solutions offered
The full IIBE is a diagnostic systematic approach designed to assess how well an organisation is designed to operate, adapt and evolve through ecosystems, especially under changing market conditions.
The Client Solutions we offer provide a clear pathway for potential clients at every level of Ecosystem thinking and maturity from start-ups, through disruptors to todays knwon Ecosystem providers to deepen and evolve their Ecosystem thinking through focused application and advice.
You will see that in the Optionality and Volatility post that finalises this series how many of todays internal constraints might offer others lookimng to disrupt or gain their competitive edge through adaptive capacity. Challengers or growing current incumbants, and those looking to disrupt as future competitors still have plenty of “upside” room to move.
Ecosystems are interconnected and integrated in different ways of business thinking to be applied. Consider a Future IIBE 3Horizon view
Discover the power of the IIBE blueprint. Lets get in touch.