Business ecosystems and strategic leadership: a stakeholder approach

Ecosystems represent organizational forms built on interconnected relationships with interdependencies and complementarities amongst various stakeholders. Ecosystem members jointly contribute to an organization’s and ecosystem members’ shared and independent successes and failures. The Fourth Industrial Revolution currently underway is characterized by new advances in physical, digital, and biological systems aimed at solving complex global challenges. Ecosystems are playing an increasingly outsized role as governance structures in this revolution. This chapter takes a new perspective on strategic leadership in business ecosystems by presenting a stakeholder approach and applying stakeholder theory to leadership in ecosystem contexts. The authors provide a brief introduction to business ecosystems, highlighting their key features and conceptual elements, discuss stakeholder theory and its application to the ecosystem context, and provide new areas of insight related to strategic leadership in ecosystems. Stakeholder theory offers the best theoretical approach to leadership in these structures because it considers all the players involved in the ecosystem, encompasses power and dependence relationships, and addresses relationships between participants. The authors present three new insights associated with ecosystem leadership: leading disparate stakeholders, leading with cooperative and competitive dynamics, and leading with trust and ethics. Applying a stakeholder approach to ecosystem leadership enables strategic leaders to achieve organizational objectives by creating, capturing, and distributing value within interconnected ecosystem structures.