Research

Research Purpose

In the last few years, the contextual conditions for organizations have changed considerably due to technical and digital, as well as social, legal, and ecological developments. It’s not necessarily that more things are changing or changing faster than they did in the past. What’s different is that changes are now much more pervasive, and they’re also more apt to interact with each other to create additional change.

Also, now-a-days, an Ecosystem needs to be understood as a property of a complex system, characterized by nonlinearity, unpredictability, and interdependence. Hence, ecosystems are no longer a property of an individual company, product, or service. However, a gap remains regarding the strategies that can be adopted to manage people and organizations from an ecosystem perspective.

Businesses have shifted from vertical integration to ecosystems, and as those ecosystems become bigger and more intricate and interconnected, changes are transmitted further, touch more entities, and take unanticipated paths to appear in unexpected places. The resulting complex, chaotic, the pressure for circularity and hence unpredictable environment calls for us to go beyond anticipating potential futures to sensing and acting on unanticipated futures. We need to engage with actual possibilities.

But how do we sense and act at pace when these possibilities emerge at the edge of overlapping ecosystems outside the firm? By connecting across boundaries, exchanging ideas, and learning about each other’s capabilities, gaining the knowledge and connections to help companies to develop new ideas and navigate the relationships needed to make them happen.

An organization needs to excel at “listening” to the ecosystem to find out what and where the new possibilities are. To encourage productive ideas, it needs to understand how to help increase the range of possibilities that the ecosystem creates—to foster the cross-boundary collaboration, co-creation and creativity that generates them. And to benefit from those ideas, it needs to be able to sense where in the ecosystem the most promising possibilities are developing

We will deal with questions at the ecosystem level, such as:

• What’s a Business Organizational Ecosystem?
• How do Ecosystems develop, mature, and break up?
• What roles do individuals, groups, and organizations play in an Ecosystem?
• When is it best to enter an ecosystem and when to leave it?

We also study the strategic decisions and changes made by Organizations in the ecosystem context:

• How do people make strategic decisions that affect Ecosystems?
• How do you organize effectively in Ecosystems?
• What changes are necessary in established companies that are confronted with ecosystems?