Where New Ecosystem Thinking Is Explored, Tested and Shaped
designing the future of innovation
Innovation needs to be designed differently, it is through a more collaborative approach and placing platform and ecosystem thinking into your process and understanding will deliver improved innovating performance
ExecutiveDecision Map and the Sequence to avoid the Five Costly Mistakes
The important five decisions that determine whether your ecosystem architecture compounds value or merely connects partners Are you on a path of emergence or ignoring root problems?
Most ecosystem strategy documents explain what an ecosystem is. This one does not. It starts where you are: in the room with a decision that has organisational consequences, a board that wants clarity, and partners who are watching what you do next.
The two sections that follow identify the five decisions organisations consistently get wrong — and the sequence of executive decisions that gets them right. They are written for CEOs and the four C-suite roles that carry ecosystem architecture into operation
Those that stand alone, fall alone. It’s a tidy line to end on in the last post, but it deserves unpacking, because “standing alone” doesn’t mean what it used to.
For most of your career, competing well meant being the strongest single entity in the room. Best product, best team, best price, best relationship. You built the company to win on those terms, and for a long time, that was the whole contest. Your rivals were doing the same thing — building their own single, self-contained strength and putting it up against yours.
Somewhere in the last few years, without an announcement, some of them stopped doing that.
This is a a different kind of piece than usually runs here. Less explainer, more mirror — one built that is being felt perhaps by you before it needs an explanation, it needs a recognition. More will follow, in the same register.
There’s a particular kind of unease that doesn’t show up in the quarterly numbers, at least not yet. It shows up first as a feeling: that the ground you’re competing on has quietly shifted, and nobody sent the memo.
You know your position should hold. You’re the established name. The safer choice, the proven track record, the relationships built over years. In any ordinary contest, that counts for something — often it counts for everything, because most buyers, most partners, most boards default to the name they already trust. Choosing the unknown over the known is supposed to be the harder decision, not the easier one.
I have been building out a series of IIBE Framework papers looking at how the European Union through its European Innovation Council (EIC), a major EU initiative supporting deep-tech startups and research, can move its new scaling mandate underpinned by deploying a recently announced Euro 5 Billion fund.
The EIC is the right institution for this. Not because it is the only EU institution with a scaling mandate, but because it is the only institution that already operates above the national interest level, already has portfolio-level visibility across node types, and is already at the moment — the first Scaleup Europe Fund investment tranche — when integrating this governance architecture is most effective. The extension of EIC’s remit from financing scale to governing the ecosystem conditions for scale is not a departure from its mandate. It is the logical completion of it.
I worked through four documents looking at a combination of ideas that look to challenge political geography and optimize functional architecture. We should look for imaginative ways for true ecosystems of capital, intelligence, connections and resources can flow freely to the points where that expertise is the strongest across Europe. We need to think beyond boundaries into optimized performance. Can we think differently across Europe when it comes to innovation, make our institutional flows stronger?
We need to invest in Ecosystem Architecture, it compounds value
Most organisations today are trying to move faster than the system they sit inside. The slowdown isn’t execution — it’s structural.
They are operating inside ecosystems without an ecosystem architecture: the missing layer that aligns capabilities, intelligence, and value creation across partners, portfolios, and products.
TheIntelligent Integrated Business Ecosystem (IIBE) provides that architecture. It turns ecosystems from fragmented networks into intelligent, adaptive systems that can sense, learn, and coordinate — so strategy, capability, and value creation move together, not apart.
If you’re feeling the limits of the system around you, the IIBE makes those limits visible — and solvable.
The Structural Problem Modern Organisations Can’t See
Across every sector — energy, industry, logistics, healthcare, finance — organisations are trying to accelerate innovation, digital transformation, and new value creation.
Recently I have been evaluating a cohort of Seven leading companies on where they are on Business Ecosystem thinking
The seven organizations are
Hitachi Energy
ABB
Maersk
Johnson Controls
DHL
Allianz
Siemens Healthineers (not Siemens AG)
Firstly you gain the universal tension they all feel
Firstly, it seems every company is caught in the same structural bind:
Their value creation now depends on actors they don’t control (utilities, ports, regulators, integrators, OEMs, hospitals, carriers, developers, insurers, cities).
Their strategic bets require multi‑actor coordination (energy transition, digital grids, smart buildings, logistics visibility, embedded insurance, connected care).
Their existing operating model is built for bilateral relationships, not multi‑actor ecosystems.
Their platforms and digital initiatives have already shown the limits of “technology + partners.”
This is their shared pain point they all can elevate into a compelling need for Ecosystem change if they have the 1)ambition and desire and 2) the understanding of what it takes..
The Architecture of Ecosystems — Do you recognize what it actually takes?
Many Business Ecosystems are not as well designed as they can be. Often, we are at the problem recognition level. Do we ever go beyond this to recognize the architectural specificity is missing and this is essential.
Do you have a real sense of what that architecture actually consists of or why its categorically different from everything you have tried before?
You now recognize the problem. The system is resisting you. The tools you built were designed for a different world. The structural layer never emerged.
But recognition is not enough.
The question every leader reaches at this point is the same: what would it actually mean to have an ecosystem architecture — and what does one consist of?
That question deserves a precise answer. Not a framework. Not a methodology. An architectural answer.
Thinking like a system needs architecture in Ecosystem design
This is a response by building on Kees Hoogervorst’s analysis at Altair Media — and on what still needs to be said related to the recent joint seven European CEO’s letter of growing concern over Europe and its (eroding) competitive position, publishef earlier this month.
Kees Hoogervorst at Altair Media published something this week that deserves to be read carefully by everyone following the European competitiveness debate. His piece — “Europe Is Starting to Think Like a System” — is one of the more precise and intellectually honest responses to the joint CEO letter that has appeared since it was published across eight national newspapers on 5 May.
His central argument is right: the letter from ASML, Airbus, Ericsson, Mistral AI, Nokia, SAP, and Siemens signals something more significant than a lobbying effort. It reflects a genuine shift in how Europe’s most capable industrial actors understand technological power — moving from a sovereignty logic focused on doing everything independently toward what he calls an indispensability logic: mastering the critical control points that the rest of the global technology economy cannot bypass.
That framing is sharp and I want to build on it. Because there is a gap between where Hoogervorst’s analysis lands and what the situation actually requires — and naming that gap precisely is the most useful contribution I can make to this conversation.
I have found the the intellectual journey of Ecosystem design tough, challenging but rewarding but have built a framework that supports business organizations to navigate this.
The Intelligent Interconnected Business Ecosystem (IIBE) did not emerge from theory. It was forged across two decades of sustained work at the intersection of strategy, technology, and organisational design — diagnosing real ecosystems, resolving real strategic tensions, and building the pattern recognition that only comes from repeated engagement with complex systems at the point where their coherence breaks down.
It synthesises and extends across five bodies of thinking:
— Platform economics and network theory — extended beyond transaction-based logic to structural ecosystem intelligence
— Ecosystem strategy thinking — given diagnostic precision and causal architecture it previously lacked
— Systems thinking and complexity science — made operationally usable rather than theoretically descriptive
— AI and intelligence integration — grounded in human meaning-making rather than deployed as isolated analytical capability
— Organisational capability building — scaled across actors the enterprise does not control
This synthesis is not borrowed. No other framework holds these domains in productive tension simultaneously. The IIBE exists because the intersections between them — where the most significant strategic tensions in complex ecosystems actually live — required an architecture that none of them individually could provide.
1. The Rupture: The Logic We Inherited No Longer Fits the World We’re In
For decades, organisations have been taught to ask a single question whenever they encounter something promising, unfamiliar, or strategically important:
“How does this scale?”
It is a reasonable question. It is also the question that quietly undermines every serious attempt at ecosystem strategy.
The problem is not the intent behind the question. The problem is the worldview beneath it.
Scale logic was built for a world of depreciating assets — a world where machines wore out, software aged, knowledge expired, and relationships were costs to be minimized. A world where value declined through use. A world where growth meant doing more of the same, faster, with greater efficiency.
