In today’s platform economy, every enterprise understands the critical role of partner ecosystem towards extending its capability and capacity for a common goal – serving the needs of customer and providing delightful customer experience. While the enterprise environment is built around systems and processes that participants (read employees) agree to follow, partner ecosystems may operate very differently.
For successfully managing business ecosystems, a careful calibration of the organization's mindset, culture, and behavior is needed. These calibrations are equally important than just having an engagement framework for running a partner ecosystem. I am sharing my top three mantras that underpin how to bring change and prepare the organization for the engagement framework that can guide the success of partner ecosystems.
Build Trust
Trust does not automatically grow over time. It must be incorporated within the fabric of the ecosystem. Research by BCG Henderson Institute showed that trust-related issues are a major cause of ecosystem failure.
Post the initial partnership announcement with clear identification of value proposition from both parties, it is imperative to have transparent business processes, provide access to accurate and timely data to all ecosystem participants, and clearly defined rules of engagement. Clearly, ecosystem leaders should focus on ways to build trust right from the early stages of the ecosystem with the Win-Win attitude.
Develop Relationship
It is hard to build any business without engagement at human level. They may be your employees, partners, vendors, and customers. Authenticity and caring are critical to build long term relationships. It is about having a partnership between people with different skills and backgrounds, companies of different sizes, and different natures.
At the ground level, such partnerships tend to find common ground and identify how one can add value with their time, resources, connections, and expertise towards serving the customers.
Collaboration and Co-creation
Collaboration is key to keeping the partner engagement alive. Most ecosystems fail because they lack active collaboration on building joint plans, defining co-marketing activities to generate demand for their joint solutions, and co-sell to customers and prospects. Partners need to go beyond formal governance structures to encourage co-creating solutions to address the customer needs. To make this collaboration work, evaluate investing in tools and platforms that enable true collaboration between participants in an ecosystem.
Building and maintaining business ecosystems in today's times is very crucial. They open up new evolutionary paths and possibilities for innovation beyond the traditional industries and company borders. These ecosystems will help unlock new possibilities for growth and differentiation, today and in the future.
