How the 100 largest marketplaces solved the chicken and egg problem

This essay presents the findings from a six month marketplace research project. There has been a lot written about online marketplaces and the goal was to test these theories by exploring data from a broader set of companies. The authors started by making a list of every marketplace founded, identifying 4,500 companies in total, then collected public data to classify and compare these companies

Liquidity Hacking – How to Build a Two-Sided Marketplace

Marketplace businesses… They always seem great on paper, but it’s so insanely hard to solve the chicken or the egg problem. Every founder I meet who’s building a marketplace business basically says the same thing: “It’s so much harder than I thought to build a two-sided marketplace.“ But of course it can be done. There are plenty of examples of success. What I’ve noticed in the … [ Read more ]

A Manager’s Dilemma: Sow or Harvest

Vijay Govindarajan, Ashish Sood, Anup Srivastava, Luminita Enache, and Barry Mishra have found that companies must focus relentlessly on building long-term competencies, even if doing so reduces immediate profits. Nonetheless, it is vital to shift focus when your product or idea becomes unexpectedly successful, so that you can milk that opportunity’s profits before it vanishes in the face of competition and technological progress.

Leading a Bionic Transformation

Three new kinds of capital give companies a new source of leverage and power.

Ten Lessons from 20 Years of Value Creation Insights

In 1998, BCG published its first Value Creators Report, which ranked the top corporations on the basis of the value they’d created over the previous five years and also attempted to draw out lessons from the winners. Since then, they have expanded their databases, refined their methodologies, and shared their perspectives annually. For the 20th report, they have now reassessed their cumulative experience and distilled … [ Read more ]

6 Factors Driving Changes to Today’s Corporate Strategies

Strategy is a competitive game, which always evolves in response to competition. But the magnitude of the changes in the technological, social, and natural environment are such that corporate strategy will need to be qualitatively reinvented again for new circumstances. This article discusses six factors are driving these changes: 1) dynamism, 2) uncertainty, 3) contingency, 4) connectedness, 5) contextuality, and 6) cognition.

What Is Your Business Ecosystem Strategy?

Drawing on the insights gleaned from three years of ecosystem research, BCG offers a step-by-step framework for developing an incumbent company’s ecosystem strategy.

The Ten Rules of Growth

Empirical research reveals what it takes to generate value-creating growth today.

How Do You Succeed as a Business Ecosystem Contributor?

Business ecosystems are on the rise. In 2000, just three among the S&P top 100 global companies relied predominantly on ecosystem business models. In 2020 this number had grown to 22 companies, which together accounted for 40% of total market capitalization.

It is no wonder that many leaders of established companies are afraid of missing out on this trend and feel compelled to come up with … [ Read more ]

How Do You Manage a Business Ecosystem?

It is widely acknowledged that business ecosystems offer great potential. Compared to more traditionally organized businesses, such as vertically integrated companies or hierarchical supply chains, business ecosystems are praised for their ability to foster innovation, scale quickly, and adapt to changing environments.

However, many companies that try to build their own ecosystems struggle to realize this potential. Our research has shown that less than 15% of … [ Read more ]

How Do You “Design” a Business Ecosystem?

If designing a traditional business model is like planning and building a house, designing an ecosystem is more like developing a whole residential district: more complex, more players to coordinate, more layers of interaction and unintended emergent outcomes.

What makes ecosystem design distinctive is that it requires a true system perspective. It is not sufficient to design the value creation and delivery model; the design must … [ Read more ]

Do You Need a Business Ecosystem?

The term “business ecosystem” has firmly established itself in the dictionary of management buzzwords. Many managers, fearful of missing out on this trend, feel compelled to come up with their own business ecosystems—or at least to become part of some large emerging ecosystems. But they struggle with the broad scope of the concept, unclear definitions, and the lack of practical advice. This article should help. … [ Read more ]

Unleashing the Innovation Power of Alliances

More companies are forging strategic alliances as they seek competitive advantage. Here’s what they must do to build and manage them successfully.

Why You Need an Operating Model: To Align Your People and Deliver You Strategy

Putting a new strategy into effect is always difficult. Andrew Campbell and Mikel Gutierrez provide a practical solution to designing the necessary changes: the Operating Model Canvas. They describe how they applied it to the merger between Siemens and Gamesa, demonstrating how this framework, along with its supporting tools, can help leaders to design changes in their organization and operations.

Building Trust in Business Ecosystems

Trust, we instinctively realize, is a precious quality that binds relationships, and nowhere more so than in business ecosystems. It’s foundational, but also fragile because all the participants in an ecosystem must learn to work with, and rely on, each other, knowing that no external force compels them to do so. Mutual trust, as much as mutual interest, binds business ecosystems.

Yet few business leaders focus … [ Read more ]

A Blue Ocean Compass for Your Post-Covid Strategy

Four questions to help you rethink industry logic and existing practices to prepare for a powerful comeback.

The Strategy-Analytics Revolution

It’s time to bring advanced analytics into the strategy room—here’s why.