Ecosystem Management Within the Firm

This chapter discusses the changes that ecosystems imply for firms’ internal management functions. The first section elaborates on ecosystem leadership: Leadership in business ecosystems requires a fundamentally different way of thinking and acting as ecosystem leaders must manage a decentralized network of diverse companies, each with its own goals and governance. The second section addresses the commercial functions and the questions of how to create and sell products across firm boundaries. This part encourages readers to rethink who the customer is, who sets the prices, and who sells the product or service. In order to achieve this, it introduces a number of key concepts, including complementary pricing, ecosystem differentiation, willingness-to-pay, and ecosystem mindset that is necessary for sales personnel to adopt in order to succeed. The third section of this chapter focuses on communication to leverage your own firm’s and others’ strengths. This section presents the importance of communication in ecosystems, its various forms, and delineates the distinctions to communication in normal organizations and compares the challenges encountered. The fourth section depicts financial planning as well as capital and risk management for ecosystems. It begins with decision factors for directing investments into ecosystems, followed by a presentation of the cost drivers of ecosystem engagement. This section also covers ecosystems arising from decentralized finance (DeFi) solutions, initial coin offerings, security token offerings, and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). In the fifth part of this chapter, legal and regulatory compliance for ecosystem managers is presented. This includes antitrust and competition laws, data privacy and security regulations, intellectual property rights, contractual arrangements, and the role of orchestrators when fulfilling legal and regulatory requirements. This chapter closes with a discussion of information technology (IT) for ecosystems by providing an overview of the various roles that IT can take on in ecosystems (i.e., enabler, augmentor, substitutor, or mediator).