Ecosystem Edge: Sustaining Competitiveness in the Face of Disruption

To succeed in the face of disruptive competition, companies will need to harness the power of a wide range of partners who can bring different skills, experience, capacity, and their own networks to the task.

With the advent of new technologies, rapidly changing customer needs, and emerging competitors, companies across more and more industries are seeing their time-honored ways of making money under threat. In this book, Arnoud De Meyer and Peter J. Williamson explain how business can meet these challenges by building a large and dynamic ecosystem of partners that reinforce, strengthen, and encourage innovation in the face of ongoing disruption.

While traditional companies know how to assemble and manage supply chains, leading the development of a vibrant ecosystem requires a different set of capabilities. Ecosystem Edge illustrates how executives need to leave notions of command and control behind in favor of strategies that will attract partners, stimulate learning, and promote the overall health of the network. To understand the practical steps executives can take to achieve this, the authors focus on eight core examples that cross industries and continents: Alibaba Group, Amazon.com, ARM, athenahealth, Dassault Systèmes S.E., The Guardian, Rolls-Royce, and Thomson Reuters. By following the principles outlined in this book, leaders can learn how to unlock rapid innovation, tap into new and original sources of value, and practice organizational flexibility. As a result, companies can gain the ecosystem edge, a key advantage in responding to the challenges of disruption that business sees all around it today.

Arnoud De Meyer is University Professor at the Lee Kong Chian School of Business at Singapore Management University. He is the coauthor of Process Theory: The Principles of Operations Management (2018) and Global Future: The Next Challenge of Asian Business (2005). Peter J. Williamson is Professor of International Management at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School and is Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. He is the coauthor of The Competitive Advantage of Emerging Country Multinationals (2013) and Dragons at Your Door: How Chinese Cost Innovation is Disrupting the Rules of Global Competition (2007).