Building Business Ecosystems to Cope with Uncertainty

Business has to cope with increasing uncertainty in its environment. While for many companies this creates a formidable challenge, it can also offer significant opportunities for those companies that innovate in the face of this uncertainty. But to take advantage of such innovations, we have proposed that companies must organize themselves differently from traditional markets or hierarchies. They need to embrace collaboration with partners in loosely coupled networks or business ecosystems, but these ecosystems are difficult to manage. Based on a wide range of case studies, it is proposed that the focus of management should be on the reduction of inefficiencies, stimulating learning and fair allocation of the value created by the ecosystem. That will require a different type of leadership, one that is collaborative in nature and where leaders can motivate people beyond their own organizations.