Navigating Ecosystem Success

This chapter is dedicated to the topic of navigating ecosystem success. The first section presents ways to assess ecosystem performance, discussing the challenges of measuring ecosystem performance, the need to include relational aspects in performance assessments, and how the dynamic nature of ecosystems influences ecosystem performance assessment. The chapter then introduces the Ecosystem Performance Indicator Cockpit (EPIC), a flexible framework that ecosystem managers can use for ecosystem performance assessments. The EPIC framework includes quantitative key performance indicators (KPIs) (operational and financial KPIs) and qualitative KPIs (strategic, executional, and relational). It also recognizes the time-dependent use of KPIs and provides specific suggestions on when to use which KPI along ecosystem development (i.e., from building over scaling to operating). The second section of this chapter reflects on ecosystem failure. It presents both functional and distributional roots of failure and discusses what lessons managers can learn from these failed cases. This part introduces the Ecosystem Health Assessment (EHA)—a systematic approach designed to analyze and enhance ecosystem health. The third and last section of this chapter is on ecosystem competition and discusses both competition within a single ecosystem and rivalry across different ecosystems. Intra-ecosystem competition encompasses both vertical competition and horizontal competition; inter-ecosystem competition requires executives to assess which other ecosystems offer similar value propositions to customers.