In 2023, we studied how companies govern digital ecosystems, including when they adopt emerging innovations in Web3-enabled governance. In our interviews, we identified three types of ecosystem governance—single leader, representative, and decentralized—that enable companies to successfully pursue business strategies within ecosystems that align with the design of the ecosystem.
In this year’s project, we will build on our findings to understand how companies can best architect or participate in digital ecosystems to grow value, including choosing the best governance approach and architecture for the company’s strategic goals and domain.
We plan to conduct a series of interviews (one to three per company) with ecosystem leaders, CIOs, CDOs, lead architects, and others—especially those from companies leading digital ecosystems—and create several case vignettes.
We will focus on the following research questions:
- What are the key architectural capabilities and principles (including governance and platform architecture) demonstrated by successful digital ecosystems?
- How does ecosystem architecture impact ecosystem and company performance in different domains?
- What are successful ecosystem architecture approaches to address social challenges such as sustainability?
SEEKING: We are seeking participation in the research from executives responsible for digital ecosystems. These could be general managers of ecosystem business units or the chief architects for those platforms, but also chief digital officers, chief information officers, and similar.
CONTACT: Ina Sebastian
