Ecosystem Leadership

What dynamic capabilities are needed to sucessfully contribute within an ecosystem? Successful companies have opened their boundaries and are leveraging external knowledge, resources, and skills. Macroeconomic developments and regulations, constantly changing customer requirements, and technological advancements lead to high dynamics and complexity. The key to transformation and effective adaptation of business models is an open and permissive organizational culture and new management practices. These are based on synergistic and systemic leadership approaches. Three ecosystem capabilities are highly relevant—openness, agility and ambidexterity. Openness internalizes the open innovation approach and promotes curiosity, motivation, and flexibility within the organizational structure to drive the creation of new ideas and solutions. Agility, precicely inter-organizational agility, is crucial for collaboration and communication and is characterized by adaptability, speed, and customer centricity. Ambidexterity is the ability to bring diametrically opposed things into a holistic context and to tackle them simultaneously. All three key principles are closely intertwined, significantly impacting knowledge, learning, and the innovative capacity of each player, who creates distinct value within an open and digital ecosystem.