How Do You Decide Where to Play in an Ecosystem?
You decide where to play by choosing between two modes — engaging with existing ecosystems and partners, or forming and leading your own — and by separating the core functionality only you can provide from the value-adds you can adopt from partners. The decision rests on where your unique strengths lie and what you need from others.
Engaging with ecosystem partners is the more common entry point and serves several aims. It can give you access to new sales and distribution channels — the most common reason providers leverage ecosystems, since digital business dramatically speeds the ability to reach new markets and deliver a complete product to buyers. It can create new customer interactions and capabilities, as companies partner outside their own industry to fulfill experiences they couldn't build alone. And it can extend or create products and services, using partners — including innovative startups — as an accelerated path to new offerings.
That last point reflects a mindset shift worth making deliberately: the wave of startups across fintech, insurtech, govtech, and similar categories can be seen as threats to the competitive landscape, but visionary CEOs treat them as ecosystem partners instead of competitors, using these innovators as a foundation for new products and services.
The key analytical step in deciding where to play is assessing your own offering honestly: identify the core functionality only you can provide versus the service value-adds you can adopt from an ecosystem partner to increase your product's potential. What's truly differentiating, you keep and build around; what's necessary but not unique, you source from partners.
The second mode is more ambitious: rather than only connecting to others' ecosystems, a CEO can establish an ecosystem leadership position — helping form the ecosystem and shape its rules and standards. That path suits companies whose core strengths let them orchestrate value for others, not just participate in value orchestrated by someone else.
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