The Ecosystem Economy

6Survival of the Fittest—Changing fromthe Inside Out: How to Make the Leap

In the previous two chapters, we provided you with some practical ways of planning how to leverage the emerging ecosystem economy to your advantage—whether that means building a new ecosystem yourself, participating in someone else's ecosystem, or somewhere in between. But this is only half of the equation. Deciding where to play, evolving your proposition, choosing what role to play, and who to partner with—these steps will only get you so far. To truly make the leap and find success in the new world of ecosystems, you need to effect change from within. You need to transform your organization from the inside out.

As we've said before, when it comes to building ecosystem businesses, half-measures are unlikely to do much good. Making a series of halfhearted, superficial changes will not cut it—in fact, doing so will hurt your chances by wasting precious time. Tinkering around the edges will not help, either. You need to rethink your approach on a fundamental level. So, to help you process the task, we've broken down the key elements you need to focus on into five discrete categories: organizational and operating model, talent, performance management, underlying culture, and supporting infrastructure.

While the advice in the following pages may seem most applicable to orchestrators, we should stipulate that much of it could be equally applicable to participants, and even companies that are not proactively ...