Designing Ecosystems

Abstract

Meaningful innovations that provide sustainable value for people and society are often systems of various products and services. That means in most cases a number of organizations are needed to realize the innovation. Thus apart from the products and services themselves, the total ecosystem needs to be designed. This has to include all the relevant social and economic actors required for a successful launch of the innovation in the market, but also for sustained service in the long run. The design of the ecosystem needs to ensure a return on investment of tangible and intangible value for all the relevant business parties and other stakeholders. This chapter shows how new ecosystems can be designed for solutions that require combinations of products and services from different organizations. It presents a method to identify the relevant stakeholders and the important values for these stakeholders, and to balance the value in the total system. The method has proved to be valuable in enriching value propositions, but also in building commitment from the different business actors to make the investments required for implementation. An approach to visualize these value flows is presented that enables the balancing of value across the different parties to ensure sustainable value for all.