Business ecosystems of the future

As Germany’s President, Frank Walter Steinmeier, reminded us in the current Covid pandemic: “No single entity covers the medical, economic, and political elements required to produce a vaccine for all”.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that to succeed in the future, companies will need harness the power of a wide range of partners who can bring different skills, experience, and capacities to the task. Yet the idea of business being organised through a network partnerships — a business ecosystem, which dates back at least to the mediaeval commons, fell out of favour, supplanted by huge vertically integrated firms and impersonal “free markets”.

In this talk Professor Peter Williamson, co-author of Ecosystem Edge: Sustaining competitiveness in the face of disruption, explains why it's now time to re-discover the benefits of business ecosystems and how this will challenge managers to think, and lead, very differently.

This talk and Q&A is now available to watch online.