Driving Growth Through Strategic Partnerships and Ecosystem Development in the Digital Age

High-growth companies don’t go it alone. Increasingly, they are achieving results by creating and orchestrating digitally connected ecosystems — coordinated networks of enterprises, devices, and customers — that create value for all of their participants. No company is an island; it depends not only on its immediate customers and partners but also on its customer's customers, end-users, providers of complementary products and services, governments, and many more. Businesses now operate in an environment with increased uncertainty, challenged by disruptive competitors who want to rewrite the rules of the game. Rapid technological evolution, the interconnectedness of the world of trade and business, and geopolitical instability are no doubt some of the reasons for this rising uncertainty. 

In more and more industries, the relevant knowledge and capabilities necessary to innovate are scattered among players and across the globe. Not only is the challenge of satisfying today's customers demanding a wider range of competencies in today's world of volatility, uncertainty, and ambiguity, the activities, and interactions between businesses underpinning your offering need to be reconfigured quickly and flexibly.

At the same time, many companies increasingly face pressure to focus on fewer core activities to reduce investments and avoid the increased costs of complexity. This focus enables them to target their capital expenditure on deploying the latest technology for their core processes and to concentrate on deepening their core competencies. "Focus and win" has become a popular catchphrase. But shrinking business to a focused core of activities is at odds with customers who demand experiences and solutions that require more integration and complexity and that bring together multiple products and services, often in customized bundles.no increasingly appealing to boost innovation and discovering new value.

Strategic Partnerships Accelerate Learnings

Strategic partnerships can deliver more innovation because they access a wider range of ideas, experiences, and capabilities through a multitude of customer engagements than is available to any company alone. As strategic partners form new relationships and interact in new ways, they generate learning that enables innovation in what is offered to customers and the way it is produced and delivered. 

Leading and Scaling the Self Organising Ecosystem?

You have to catalyze, shape, and lead the business ecosystem, that will harness its potential using smart power rather than by imposing strategies as the largest resource-rich participant. Leveraging an ecosystem enables you to harness the power of a large, dynamic, and partly self-organizing network of partners to help you serve your customers. Like a living organism ecosystem continuously evolves and adjusts to meet their changing needs. As the leader of an ecosystem, your own business needs to adjust the way it gets things done so that it can effectively leverage an ever-changing partner network. The new roles, processes, and leadership styles that you will put in place will further help transform your existing structures into a more agile ecosystem driven organization. 

Example - Introducing AiPEX, an Artificially Intelligent Index with IBM Watson.

Developed by an ecosystem partner adding another dimension and new use case to Watson.

Driving Growth and Revenues with XaaS business models

Growth is about attracting new customers and new partners. But it also requires the ecosystem leader to help attract the right partners: those with the right capabilities and knowledge the ecosystem will need to thrive. Discovering any of the new sources of value requires new connections. These links may be between different products and services, capabilities, or knowledge assets that have not interacted earlier because they were isolated by boundaries between companies, by geographical distance, by technological incompatibility, or simply by the perception that nothing would be gained by bringing them together. To discover new value, every ecosystem leaders need to stimulate new connections.

Ecosystems, where partners collaborate through loosely coordinated development and experimentation, can absorb uncertainty more effectively than traditional hierarchies or even subcontracting relationships, where deliverables have to be precisely specified in advance and structures are more difficult to reconfigure. This advantage is reinforced by the ability of ecosystems to enable ecosystem leaders to reap economies of scale and network.

As you develop and scale your Ecosystem of partners below are some pointers you should consider and provide answers with full authenticity for your all stakeholders:

? Foundation partners are key to the successful start of an ecosystem. Do not go for the easy solution of looking for the biggest or the most established partners. Instead ask yourself: Which capabilities do I need? What are the characteristics of ideal foundation partners?

? Potential partners need an initial road map of how the ecosystem will develop to encourage them to engage and invest. They know this will evolve over time as the ecosystem learns and innovates. But ask yourself how you can establish some signposts that can guide your partners to the roles they can play and where they need to consider investing to enable the ecosystem to create and capture value.

? Potential partners will want to know what is in it for them when they join the ecosystem. Have you articulated a set of value propositions for partners that will entice them to join? Have you communicated those value propositions broadly to reach potential partners, some of whom you may not have identified as potential contributors?

? Have you made investments and developed interfaces that reduce the costs and barriers that might impede partners joining your ecosystem?

? Have you identified ways to attract partners that can bring their own sub-ecosystems and so help speed up the growth of your ecosystem?