Organizational Ecosystems - Integrating Platforms and Experiences for Innovative Alignment

Perhaps one of the best perks working at a university is perusing the books that people discard when cleaning their offices. Recently I was strolling to the copy machine, and saw the book Strategy Rules: Five Timeless Lessons from Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs. This is the type of book I might never intentionally buy, but would be happy to give a look if free. Leafing through it, I was immediately intrigued by “Chapter 3: Build Platforms and Ecosystems – Not Just Products.” I’m all about thinking in terms of experience ecosystems, and recently heard CallMiner CTO and Founder Jeff Gallino speak about the importance of platforms and ecosystems. It was like the universe was converging in this single synchronous moment.

The book authors wrote, “Great strategies, especially in technology markets, don’t just try to build great products or even great companies. Their goal is usually to build industry-wide platforms that bring together a broad ecosystem of partners engaged in complementary product and service innovation” (p.93). This is pretty close to what Jeff was expressing in his talk at Listen19, where he stressed platforms are:

                Open
                Participative
                Ecosystem-centric
                Networked

The upshot of both of these statements is that companies can best succeed by seeking to connect with broader offerings, not just offering stand-alone products but integrated solutions.

Both of these presentations made me think about experience ecosystems and the need integrate internal experience channels as well. While thinking in terms of platform ecosystems may draw our attention to connecting with external partners, experience ecosystems can draw our attention to a company’s internal alignment.

George Labovitz and Victor Rosansky in their book Rapid Realignment state, “Alignment is a condition in which they key elements of an organization – its people, strategy, customers, and processes – work in concert to serve the primary purpose of the enterprise: increasing value for stakeholder” (p.3). It is important here to note the word they use is stakeholders, and not shareholders. Thus, the organization must look at its various experience challenges within their ecosystem to determine if they are aligning to work together to make the company prepared to take its place in the broader platform ecosystem.

Part of the value of platform and experience ecosystems is in their diversity, and ability to incorporate disparate elements and strengths into a unified whole. However, to work together they have to be integrated. For platform ecosystems, products have to be technologically networked and designed so they are complimentary. For experience ecosystems, companies have to be mindful of how there are unifying their organizational elements toward a common objective.

Leveraging these connections can help to fuel opportunity and innovation not just through creating new products, but creative ways of arranging those partnerships. For this to happen, companies first have to have the goal of building those partnerships externally, and creating alignment internally. Doing so will yield the most healthy ecosystem possible.