Interaction Field Modelling

A business interaction model describes how a company creates value through the exchanges between its participants rather than through what it produces on its own. Interaction field modelling is the work of building that model formally: naming every participant, specifying what each one gives and gets, identifying the single interaction that compounds, and stating what the whole system is worth in the same financial terms as any other investment. The framework comes from The Interaction Field, written by our founder Erich Joachimsthaler.

• Since 1999brand, business model and growth 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

This is bought by a CEO, chief strategy officer or chief digital officer who can see that the company’s most valuable activity is no longer happening inside the company, and has no way to put that on a page the board will fund. The trigger is usually one of these.

• A platform investment is about to be signed. The technology decision is nearly made and nobody has answered what the platform would compound. Buying the mechanism before modelling the field is the most expensive order to do this in.
• Partners are creating value on top of what you make, without your involvement and sometimes without your knowledge. Somebody else is capturing the margin on a system you built the foundation of.
• The competitor who worries the board is not in your category and does not sell what you sell. Category logic cannot explain the threat, so planning keeps producing answers to the wrong question.
• Growth inside the category is exhausted and every adjacent move on the table is an acquisition. The alternative is a model in which other participants do work you would otherwise have to buy.
• Your data is worth more to your partners than it is to you, or would be if you let them use it, and there is no model that says what you should get in return.

Why the ecosystem map does not answer the question

Most companies already have a diagram of their ecosystem. It is a set of logos arranged around a center, and it fails as a model for three specific reasons.

It records relationships, not exchanges. A line between two logos says a relationship exists. It does not say what moves along the line, in which direction, how often, or what either party would lose if it stopped. A model that cannot answer those questions cannot be used to decide anything.

It assumes value flows through participants rather than between them. That is a value chain with more boxes. In a chain, inputs enter, value is added inside the firm, output leaves. In an interaction field, value is created between participants, including participants who have no contract with you at all. Adding partners to a chain does not change its direction.

It has no economics attached. The map does not say what the field would have to be worth to justify building it, so the conversation stays a strategy conversation and never becomes an investment conversation. Our 2026 study of twenty-four years of stock market data found that strong global brands beat the S&P 500 by 3.7 percentage points a year from 2001 to 2024, turning a dollar into $15.85 against $7.03 in the index. Systems that compound get valued differently from systems that do not, and the modelling work is how you argue that in advance rather than after.

The useful distinction is between a platform and a field. A platform is a mechanism, usually technology that matches two sides and takes a fee. It is one way to run an interaction field and it is neither necessary nor sufficient. Plenty of platforms match transactions efficiently and compound nothing, because nothing one participant does makes the next participant’s experience better.

What our business interaction model services include

Five bodies of work. Most engagements use three or four of them.

1. The participant map

Every participant in the system and what each one actually contributes, defined by the contribution rather than by the category label. Customers contribute demand, data, content, judgment, reputation and other customers. Partners contribute reach, capability and credibility. Regulators contribute permission and constraint, which is a contribution. Software agents contribute matching, recommendation, translation and coordination, and they change what coordination across organizational boundaries costs. A participant who contributes nothing is not in your field, whatever the contract says.

2. The shared interest test

Not a shared market, a shared interest: something all participants genuinely want to see happen that none of them can produce alone. It is the only reason a participant who does not work for you does work for the field. We test the candidate from each participant’s point of view, not yours. Where no shared interest survives the test, what you have is a partner program with a new name, and we say so.

3. The compounding interaction

In a working field one specific interaction makes the next one more valuable, and every additional participant improves the experience of the participants already there. We inventory what happens between participants today, at what frequency, and run each candidate through the same test: does an additional participant make this better, worse or neutral for the existing ones. Most candidates fail. Knowing which fail is the point, because the one that passes is what you invest in and everything else is supporting apparatus.

4. The feedback path

The field has to learn. What participants do has to change what the system offers, fast enough that participants notice. We specify what the system observes, what it changes in response, and how quickly the loop runs. A field with no feedback path degrades into a directory: technically connected, no longer improving.

5. The economics of the model

What the field would have to be worth to justify building it, expressed as the spread between return on invested capital and the cost of that capital, so the case is argued in the same terms as every other investment on the agenda. This is also where the make, partner or acquire question gets answered, because a field that compounds changes what you have to own.

How an interaction field modelling engagement works

1. Frame. Leadership interviews, a review of where value is currently created and captured, and a first list of candidate participants including the ones with no commercial relationship to you. The output is the question the model has to answer, written down.
2. Model. Participants, contributions, the exchange inventory and the candidate shared interest, built with the data you hold and tested against participants outside the company. The output is a model specific enough to be wrong.
3. Test. Each candidate interaction run through the compounding test, the feedback path designed, and the economics attached. The output is a shortlist with exclusions, not a menu.
4. Decide. What to build, what to partner for, what to stop funding, and the measurement that tells you within a quarter whether the field is compounding. The output is a decision the finance function can sign.

Why companies choose Vivaldi for business interaction modelling

The interaction field is our own framework, not a borrowed one. Our founder wrote the book that defines it, and the modelling discipline on this page is the version we use with clients rather than the version in the index.

Two things follow from that. The first is that we will tell you when the answer is no. A large share of the businesses that ask for this work do not have an interaction field and should run a conventional strategy, and a firm that sells the framework regardless is selling the word. The second is that the model arrives with economics attached. The point of the exercise is a decision about capital, so the output is built to be argued in front of a CFO rather than admired in a workshop.

We have been building business models and growth strategy since 1999, from 10 offices on four continents, and our work has been recognized five times in the WirtschaftsWoche Best of Consulting awards for strategy and innovation.

How to evaluate an interaction field consultant

• Ask them to name the single interaction in your business that compounds. If the answer is a list, they are describing an ecosystem map.
• Ask what happens if the model says no field exists. A consultant with only one answer available will find a field whatever the evidence.
• Ask how the model attaches to economics. If return on capital never comes up, the output will not survive the budget round.
• Ask which participants they include who have no contract with you. Fields are defined partly by participants you do not pay.
• Ask what they would hand your team so the model stays current after they leave. A model nobody updates is a slide.

Interaction field modelling, a platform vendor or a management consultancy?

Related work

One boundary worth stating plainly, because the names are close. Customer experience and CX strategy is the customer-facing half: designing the ecosystem and the interactions customers live inside. This page is the business-model half: modelling the company itself as an interaction field, with the participants, the exchanges and the economics of the model. Four connected services:

• Digital ecosystem design if the field is identified and the question is how to build and govern it.
• Platform strategy if the mechanism that runs the interactions is the decision in front of you.
• New business models if the question is how the field makes money rather than how it works.
• Ecosystem branding if the field exists and the brand inside it is not legible to the participants you need.

This service sits inside our digital platforms and ecosystems practice, alongside global digital programs for companies running the build across markets, and the demand landscape is often the more productive place to start when no field is present. Further reading: how to recognize an interaction field business model, the case for live interaction as a growth model, and how AI marketplaces are building interaction fields.

Business interaction modelling in the US and worldwide

We work with clients from 10 offices on four continents, with the practice concentrated in New York and across Europe. Interaction fields rarely respect a single market: participants, regulators and the software agents that increasingly mediate between them sit in different jurisdictions, and a model built for one country usually breaks at the first border. We build the model once and specify where it has to vary, so a company running the same field in the US, Germany and Asia is arguing from one set of economics rather than three.