Title: Competing within Ecosystems: sustaining ways of creating indirect value
Author: P.J. Boxer
Category: Presentation
Year: 2012
Where Presented: School of Systems & Enterprises, Stevens Institute of Technology
The presentation will discuss the nature of the complexity that makes this way of thinking about the relationships between suppliers and customers ‘non-classical’. Thus entanglement means moving from a one-sided to a multi-sided understanding of markets, which changes the unit of analysis from the supplier to the ecosystem with which the supplier is interacting. Analysing market behaviours in a way that is driven by a tempo of demand organised by customers’ value deficits means that there are many different local environments within which market behaviours are expected to be aligned. A quantum metaphor will be used to cast light on what makes this way of thinking ‘non-classical’. The varieties of simultaneous behaviours which the business platform must be able to support are a superposed set of states. Each customer’s local environment collapses a singular local state from this platform that need not be correlated with states experienced in other customers’ environments. This collapse takes place through the local coherence created by alignment processes organised by shared meaning established within the customer’s local environment. Two implications drawn from this way of thinking will be discussed: first, how are agile platforms to be engineered if they are to support this level of variety in simultaneous complex behaviours; and second, how are the forms of agency to be developed within an organisation through which many forms of simultaneous local coherence may be created and sustained cost-effectively at its edges.