Ecosystem Edge by Peter J. Williamson

Author:Peter J. Williamson [Meyer, Arnoud De]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2020-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

7

Unleashing Ecosystem Learning and Innovation

ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT ADVANTAGES OF AN ECOSYSTEM is its exceptional ability to foster co-learning and catalyze innovation. The ecosystem leader can play a pivotal role in turning that potential for learning and innovation into reality.

New knowledge is the lifeblood of innovation in an ecosystem. Consequently, the ecosystem leader’s role starts with the actions it can take to bring new knowledge into the ecosystem or to ensure that fresh ideas are generated from the ecosystem’s day-to-day activities. Once that knowledge is captured, the ecosystem leader must harness that knowledge to trigger innovation. Sometimes it is the ecosystem leader itself that innovates, using knowledge it has accumulated by virtue of its pivotal position in the ecosystem. But equally important, the ecosystem leader can also encourage its partners to innovate, individually and jointly. To facilitate such innovation, ecosystem leaders must disseminate knowledge so that both explicit and tacit knowledge gets to those who can effectively use it to innovate.

At the same time, ecosystem leaders need to keep proprietary some of that new knowledge their ecosystems generate. Proprietary knowledge underpins a leader’s soft power and, as we will see in the next chapter, can be critical to ensuring they can monetize their contributions to the ecosystem. Deciding how much knowledge to share with partners in order to stimulate innovation, and how much knowledge to keep proprietary, is one of the most fundamental calls an ecosystem leader needs to make.

Encouraging Inf lows of New Knowledge

Ecosystem leaders infuse new knowledge into the ecosystem by deploying strategies to engage with a wide variety of partners, each of whom brings distinctive capabilities and experiences to the network. The benefits of a strategy that is carefully designed to stimulate fresh inflows of knowledge is well illustrated by the example of The Guardian, one of the UK’s oldest and best-known newspapers, and a case we already touched upon in chapter 6.

Started as the Manchester Guardian, a regional newspaper in England in 1821, for the first 178 years it was a newspaper, initially thriving, and, more recently, struggling like most of its rivals as advertising and content increasingly moved to the internet. Even so, the ecosystem that The Guardian has built since 2000 has made it the fourth-most-popular news portal in the world, attracting over 270 million unique visitors in February 2019. Almost two-thirds of them came from outside the United Kingdom, 26 percent from the United States alone.1

Central to The Guardian’s success has been the decisions taken by its top management team during the early 2000s, aimed at harnessing the knowledge and capabilities of its partners. This led to a business model different from its rivals. Rather than producing and distributing content for which readers are willing to pay, and selling advertising alongside that content, The Guardian built an ecosystem that is able to continually access new knowledge from readers, advertisers, and other news outlets. In this way, the ecosystem was continually refreshed with diverse flows of new content.

Initially, this idea faced a lot of internal resistance.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.