Digital Ecosystem Consulting

Digital ecosystem consulting is the work of deciding who participates in creating value, what each participant contributes and receives, which interaction becomes more valuable as more participants join, and where the economic profit ends up. The platform architecture follows from those four answers rather than standing in for them. Vivaldi has done this work since 1999, for companies including Rally and Takeda, and it sits inside our business strategy and transformation practice.

An ecosystem is an economic structure before it is a technology program. The framework behind this work is our own. The Interaction Field, set out by our founder Erich Joachimsthaler, holds that value in a modern business is created between participants rather than delivered by a firm to a customer. A conventional company runs a value chain: assemble inputs, produce, deliver, capture margin at the point of sale. An interaction field runs differently. Customers, partners, suppliers, developers, regulators and at times competitors create value with each other, and the company’s job is to make those interactions happen, compound, and stay worth having for everyone inside them.

• Since 1999platform and ecosystem strategy
• 200+published case studies
• 10 officeson four continents
• 5xWirtschaftsWoche Best of Consulting, Strategy and Innovation
• The Interaction Fieldwritten by our founder

When companies bring us in

Almost nobody calls asking for an ecosystem. They call because a platform roadmap has outrun the argument for it. These are the five situations we see most often:

• The platform is funded and nobody can say who it is for. There is a build plan, a budget and a partner list, and no stated reason a partner would show up.
• You connected your own products and called it a platform. It works, it saves money, and the market is pricing it as a cost program rather than growth.
• The ecosystem exists and someone else is capturing it. Traffic, data and the customer relationship are accruing to a participant that is not you.
• You have just acquired businesses that touch the same customer. You have to decide whether that is a portfolio or a field, because the two are funded differently.
• AI has changed what you can coordinate. Work that was too expensive to share across a company boundary is suddenly economic to share, and the boundary needs redrawing.

The people we work with are usually the CEO, chief strategy officer or chief digital officer, with the CFO close by. The CFO matters here more than in most strategy work, because an ecosystem decision is a capital allocation decision wearing a technology diagram.

Why connecting your own products is not an ecosystem

Most ecosystem strategies arrive at a board as a technology decision with an architecture diagram attached. The market reads the difference immediately, and prices it.

A company that links its own products and calls the result a platform has described an integration project. Integration is supply-side work: the same demand served at lower cost. That is a harvesting story. An ecosystem that opens a demand space the company could not reach alone, and holds a position inside it that rivals cannot reproduce, is a growth story. Only one of those re-rates a company. So the first question is never what to build. It is whether the structure being proposed changes where demand goes.

The second test is harder, because participation is not capture. Ecosystems create genuine value and hand it to somebody else all the time, usually to whoever holds the demand relationship or the data that makes the next interaction better. We trace that through the Compound Economic Profit Loop: the demand space, then the right to win inside it, then what that does to price, volume and capital intensity, then the spread between return on invested capital and cost of capital, then economic profit, then the multiple the market pays. Ecosystems move three of those terms at once, which is exactly why they can be so valuable and so often are not. We have written about why capital allocation does not create value and future demand does.

There is a newer reason to get this right. The main thing keeping work inside a firm rather than across its boundary is that coordinating across a boundary is expensive: negotiating, verifying, handling exceptions, reconciling afterward. AI is lowering that cost, and lowering it across boundaries as well as inside them, which moves the efficient boundary of the firm and makes interactions that were uneconomic to share economic to share. It also means your field acquires participants that are not people. Design them the way you design human participants: what they contribute, what they receive, which decisions they may take alone, and where a decision escalates to a person. That last boundary is where governance belongs. We set the argument out in how AI marketplaces are building interaction fields.

What our digital ecosystem consulting services include

Six capabilities sit in this group. Most engagements need two or three of them, and which ones depends on where the argument currently breaks. Each links through to its own page.

1. Interaction Field Modelling

Start here when the question is who are the participants, and which interaction gets better as more of them join? This is the reference the rest of the group points back to, and it is where the value exchange is written down from each participant’s side rather than yours. See Interaction Field Modelling.

2. Platform strategy

Start here when the question is what is the business model, and on what terms does anyone participate? Pricing, take rate, access rules, data rights and the subsidy you pay in the early period when you give more than you receive. See platform strategy.

3. Digital ecosystem design

Start here when the question is what has to exist for participants to actually reach each other? The architecture, the data model, the integration surface and the partner mechanics, specified after the economics are settled rather than before. See digital ecosystem design.

4. New business model design

Start here when the question is how does this company make money if it is no longer only selling its own products? Revenue architecture, unit economics and capital intensity for models built on platform and ecosystem structures. See new business model design.

5. Ecosystem branding

Start here when the question is what does this field mean to a participant who has a choice? That answer is what produces the preference premium, and it is the difference between an orchestrator brand and a logo on a partner page. See ecosystem branding, and our guide to building orchestrator brands.

6. Global digital programs

Start here when the question is how does this land in twenty markets without becoming twenty different things? Sequencing, local ownership, governance and the parts that must stay common. See global digital programs.

How a digital ecosystem engagement works

1. Map the field. Participants, the exchange between each of them and the company, and the interactions that already exist whether or not anyone designed them. The output is an honest picture of the field you are actually in, which is rarely the one on the partner slide.
2. Decide where the profit accrues. Which demand space the field opens, who holds the relationship and the data, what the structure does to price, volume and capital intensity, and whether the spread widens or narrows. This is the decision the rest of the work depends on.
3. Design the platform and the terms of participation. The business model, the access and data rules, the architecture and data model that let participants reach each other, and the brand that tells a participant why this field rather than another.
4. Land it and govern it. Market sequencing, partner onboarding, the feedback path that lets the system learn from its own interactions, and the escalation boundary for decisions taken by software rather than people.

Mapping the field and settling where the profit accrues usually takes about a quarter. What follows depends mostly on how many participants have to agree, which is the variable most platform plans underestimate.

Digital ecosystem consulting results

Rally: a bus-sharing business rebuilt as a platform ecosystem

In 2017 over 50,000 people used Rally, a bus-sharing platform, to organize their travel to the Women’s March in Washington D.C. A year later its founder was running a fast-growing business in a consumer world reshaped by the sharing economy, and brought Vivaldi in to make the platform opportunity real. We audited Rally’s existing internal structure to find where the platform’s value sat and where the friction was, looked at how crowd-powered companies inside and outside transportation engaged their audiences, and ran workshops and interviews with the team. Out of that we developed an algorithm and service design for connecting riders traveling on the same trip, then redesigned the core user flow with a full sitemap and wireframes for app, desktop and tablet, plus the messaging and design direction to carry it.

Rally saw a 68% conversion rate increase within one month of the relaunch. The structural outcome mattered more: Rally stopped being a solution to event transportation and became a bridge between every participant in the platform, from bus operators to event coordinators. In 2018 Daimler became Rally’s first equity investor, adding a premium bus supplier as a further participant in the ecosystem. Read the full story: adding fuel to a platform business with crowd power.

Takeda: modeling the patient ecosystem behind a category strategy

Takeda wanted to build in-market solutions across parts of its brand portfolio and brought Vivaldi in as a growth partner. The work ran in three phases. We analyzed the current patient journey through several lenses with a single view on patient experience and expectations, combined cultural trends with Takeda’s existing consumer research, and highlighted six opportunity areas where Takeda could play a role in the future lives of patients. Global relevance was then assessed to prioritize the trends and determine which innovation platforms had the highest potential.

The output included a model of how Takeda would need to reimagine the development of its patient ecosystem, alongside a category playbook and narrative. Note the sequence, because it is the one we argue for throughout this page: the ecosystem model defined which participants Takeda had to serve before any solution was specified. Read the full story: pioneering patient-centric healthcare solutions.

Why companies choose Vivaldi for digital ecosystem work

• The framework is ours. The Interaction Field is our founder’s book and our method, not a model borrowed from a research house. You can read where it came from in our introduction to the Interaction Field.
• We start from demand, not from architecture. The Demand Landscape method, set out in Hidden in Plain Sight, finds the demand spaces a field could open before anyone specifies a system.
• We answer where the economic profit accrues. The Compound Economic Profit Loop traces the move from demand space to the spread between return on invested capital and cost of capital, which is the number a board is actually deciding on.
• The thinking is published and testable. Our WARC playbook on ecosystem brands and our guide to platform business transformation set out the method in public, before you hire anyone.
• Independently recognized. WirtschaftsWoche has named Vivaldi a top consultancy for Strategy and Innovation in its Best of Consulting awards five times.

How to evaluate a digital ecosystem consulting firm

Worth asking of every firm on your shortlist, including us.

• Where does the economic profit accrue? If the answer is a diagram of connected boxes rather than a named participant, the work has not been done. Participation is not capture.
• What makes a participant join, and what makes them stay? A firm that cannot state the exchange from the partner’s side has drawn your wish list, not a field.
• Which interaction gets better as more participants arrive? If none does, you have a distribution network. It is worth building and it should be funded as one.
• Is this a demand-side or a supply-side move? Connecting your own products at lower cost is a good idea and it is not a growth story. Say which one you are buying.
• What does the architecture cost in capital intensity? Funding infrastructure that participants would have funded themselves is the most common way an ecosystem narrows the spread it was meant to widen.

Ecosystem strategy firm, systems integrator or platform engineering shop?

All three get shortlisted for the same brief and they decide different things. The useful question is which decision you still need made.

If you want to see the shapes these structures take in practice first, our write-ups on digital ecosystem examples and platform business models work through the live ones.

Digital ecosystem consulting in the US and worldwide

Vivaldi is headquartered in New York and has a second US office in Los Angeles. Outside the US, our teams work from London, Zürich, München, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Singapore, Buenos Aires and Lima. Ecosystems rarely stop at a border, and the governance question is usually the one that travels worst, so we staff these programs across offices. Read who Vivaldi Group is and how we work.