Strategic planning managment

Productivity

Robustness

niche creation

• The business equivalent is a network’s ability to consistently transform technology and other raw materials of innovation into lower costs and new products.
• There are a number of ways to measure this: A relatively simple one is return on invested capital.

• To provide durable benefits to the species that depend on it, a biological ecosystem must persist in the face of environmental changes.
• Similarly, a business ecosystem should be capable of surviving disruptions such as unforeseen technological change.
• The benefits are obvious: A company that is part of a robust ecosystem enjoys relative predictability, and the relationships among members of the ecosystem are buffered against external shocks.
• Perhaps the simplest, if crude, measure of robustness is the survival rates of ecosystem members, either over time or relative to comparable ecosystems. 

• There is something about the idea of diversity, in business as well as in biology, that suggests an ability to absorb external shocks and the potential for productive innovation.
• The best measure of this in a business context is the ecosystem’s capacity to increase meaningful diversity through the creation of valuable new functions, or niches.
• One way to assess niche creation is to look at the extent to which emerging technologies are actually being applied in the form of a variety of new businesses and products. 

• A keystone organization is one that aims to enhance the overall health of the network by creating value and sharing value.
• “Keystones can create value and increase ecosystem productivity by simplifying the complex task of connecting network participants to one another or by making the creation of new products by third parties more efficient”.
• They can also share value, increase robustness and influence niche creation by sharing innovative technologies. 

• An ecosystem dominator is pretty much the opposite of a keystone organization. Instead of adding value, a dominator may drain the system (value dominator) or even take over the system (physical dominator) by exploiting a critical position.
• A value dominator indirectly affects the system by extracting as much of the value the other members of the ecosystem have created possibly not leaving enough value to sustain the system.
• On the other hand, a physical dominator directly affects the system by aiming “to integrate vertically or horizontally to own and manage a large proportion of a network”