Exploring Ecosystems
From Business to Experience Ecosystems
Unpacking an Experience Ecosystem
Using an Ecosystem Map as a Tool
CHAPTER 3 WORKSHOP: Landscape Alignment
Example Pitch to Participants (and Their Managers)
All organizations sit within a complicated system of relationships of people, processes, technologies, regulations, and competitors. At every level, their employees make decisions to chart the best course through these ever-changing variables to support organizational objectives. Around each corner are risks and opportunities. Each choice affects the next; each action opens or closes new possibilities.
Customers, in turn, live within their own world—one in which they are the center, not your organization. Every day, between when they wake up and go to bed, customers navigate complex environments of people, places, and things (both seen and unseen) to meet their needs, chase their desires, and lead their lives. It’s a giant sea of stuff, relationships, and possible futures.
These dynamics help shape each discrete interaction a person has with a product or service. These interactions, in turn, determine the health of the overall customer relationship. Therefore, understanding this greater context—the colliding worlds of an organization and its customers—comes with the territory of orchestrating experiences (see Figure 3.1).
FIGURE 3.1 When they interact, an organization and its customers bring with them complex relationships, influencers, and objectives.
In this chapter, you will learn how to unpack an experience ecosystem to reveal relationships that influence customer needs, expectations, and behaviors today. These insights then can inform how you navigate and influence this ecosystem in the future. Before going too far, let’s start with a refresher on the concept of ecosystems and its common application in business.
From Business to Experience Ecosystems
Your first exposure to the concept of an ecosystem was likely in grade school science. Perhaps it was explained as follows:
The sun shines on the river, causing water evaporation. Clouds form, and rain falls upon the land. Plants absorb the water and nutrients from the soil and then flower. Bees and birds travel from flower to flower, picking up and pollinating other parts of the land. The bees use the pollen to make honey. And so on, and so on.
These simple stories helped us understand that ecosystems, while complex, are made up of many moving parts that can be identified and studied in relation to one another. Changing any of these individual relationships can have a profound effect on the rest of the ecosystem. Raise the temperature of the earth a bit, and you will lose the bees. With no bees, pollen isn’t spread, and then you have a plant problem. These relationships, therefore, are critical to scientific observations and understanding of cause and effect within any given ecosystem.
Business Ecosystems
Over time, these concepts have influenced thinking in business strategy, innovation, and economic theory. In the early 1990s, James F. Moore published “Predators and Prey: A New Ecology of Competition,” transforming companies’ traditional views of competition. Moore argued that
[A] company [should] be viewed not as a member of a single industry but as part of a business ecosystem that crosses a variety of industries. In a business ecosystem, companies coevolve capabilities around a new innovation: they work cooperatively and competitively to support new products, satisfy customer needs, and eventually incorporate the next round of innovations.1
Moore saw business ecosystems as a changing set of relationships based on evolving factors, such as new technologies, regulations, environmental concerns, and other trends. To understand these changing dynamics, ecological frameworks would reveal which ecosystems to participate in, identify opportunities to provide new value to customers, and “[orchestrate] the contributions of a network of players.”2
A good example of this in action is the frenemy relationship between Apple and Samsung. While these two giants compete vigorously in increasingly more product categories, Samsung is also a provider of components to Apple’s computers, phones, and tablets. Similarly, Apple and Google partner and compete (and sue) in multiple ways.
Another example is the Amazon Marketplace (see Figure 3.2). While Amazon is viewed as a disruptive competitor in many retail segments, it actively recruits other retailers to sell directly on Amazon’s platform. This enables Amazon to provide a greater selection of merchandise while keeping its customers in close orbit. This strategy also creates a greater return on investment on core capabilities, such as the technologies, partnerships, and processes behind transacting, shipping, and returning.
FIGURE 3.2 Amazon Marketplace is built upon the concept of keeping your friends close and your competitors even closer.
Experience Ecosystems
Your organization’s business ecosystem should inform your work, but don’t stop there. You can also codify the seen and unseen relationships that shape customer needs and behaviors. This vantage point—an experience ecosystem—places the customer at the center of the world to help make sense of their context. You then can see more clearly if and how you are a part of that world.
This simple reframing can help challenge inside-out thinking that tends to oversimplify the variables that determine customer needs and behaviors. This understanding can then inform the design of your system of channels and touchpoints from value propositions to discrete interactions. As illustrated in Figure 3.3, reminding stakeholders that their product or service is merely one part of the customer’s life