Digital ecosystems are changing the ways we work. 

In digital environments, it is not useful to do everything on your own. It is no longer possible to take a manufacturing-type pipeline approach to your value chain (where you design, build, and distribute a full product to your customers and users). Solving complex, socio-economic and environmental challenges (like encouraging sustainability, improving population health, supporting financial wellbeing, or fostering market access for all supply chain actors) requires collaboration across a wide range of stakeholders. 

Understanding the context, mapping stakeholders, identifying opportunities to build relationships, and taking collaboration action are all part of having an ecosystem mindset.

Trends that have led to ecosystem approaches

A number of trends have converged globally to give rise to the ecosystem approach and that now require a rethink for any organisation operating in a digital environment:

• Digital transformation
• Regulations and standards to define ecosystem guardrails
• Emergence of digital public goods and digital public infrastructure
• Opportunities to use data and build digital products and services in new ways.

Digitisation and Digital transformation

Over the past ten to fifteen years, industry sectors have embraced the challenge of digital transformation: building new digital infrastructures for their organisations so that they can provide online services that reduce the need for physical interaction and to collect data to improve decision-making and monitor impact.

This has generated two key challenges: new risks from unregulated data use and new challenges from a lack of interoperability.

• New risks from unregulated data use: As this digital transformation has occurred, new infrastructure providers have entered markets. This has introduced new vectors of risk in cybersecurity and data privacy. The rapid scaling of some of these infrastructure providers has also increased the risk of creating power imbalances as the new providers seek to control and manipulate market access through leveraging all the data that flows through their systems.
• New challenges from a lack of interoperability: Digital transformation has also been implemented at the organisation level. This has created some fragmentation, duplication and interoperability challenges as each organisation applies their own data models and technical infrastructure choices during their digitalisation.

Regulations and standards to support interoperability

As a result, the past ten years has seen an increase in the use of regulations and standards as policy instruments to address these risks:

• Regulations have been introduced by governments around the globe to clarify data ownership, protect data privacy, ensure security of data systems (especially  for critical infrastructure), decouple the roles of infrastructure providers from data users to reduce market imbalances, and, at times, to mandate interoperability approaches to ensure that data is accessible for all stakeholders.
• Standards have also increased in their value as a mechanism to define interoperability requirements for data models and infrastructural approaches used for data exchange between various stakeholders.

As part of this global digital transformation, there has become a greater recognition of the value of data beyond the primary purpose for which it is collected and used.  

With regulations and standards in place, there is the hope that data can be used in new ways to create new products and services, improve market access, address inequalities, and generate efficiencies. This has given rise to the idea that data is a digital public good, and that society needs a range of digital public infrastructure to allow equitable access to data and to digital systems and processes that codify the regulations and standards that have been defined.

In our experience at Platformable, we have seen how regulations have opened market access, and standards have scaled participation opportunities in a market.

The emergence of digital public goods and infrastructure

In the past five years or so, governments and multilateral organisations have shifted towards supporting digital public infrastructure to continue to reduce risks of power imbalances and in recognition that all stakeholders need a common set of digital components to assist whole industry sectors to operate digitally first.

Depending on the maturity of the regulatory and standards environment, industry sectors are building out a suite of digital public infrastructure components to enable everyone to operate digitally. This digital public infrastructure is being built in a number of ways:

• Governments are directly providing these digital services and platforms for others to build on. For example, by creating data registries and exposing data in machine readable formats so that they can be used directly in digital products and services built by industry. In some countries including India and Brazil, governments are building digital public infrastructure as the core socio-economic IT infrastructure on which businesses and governments operate.
• Governments are mandating that organisations must make certain data or services available to all stakeholders. Where stakeholders may charge for these services, there may be requirements to provide a level of access for free, to use specific standards or data models to ensure interoperability, and/or to protect end user's rights to access and withdraw their own data at any time (known as data portability).
• Governments and industry bodies are creating tools that codify regulations and/or standards or providing guidance that defines the guardrails or 'rules of engagement' for any  stakeholder wishing to participate in the industry sector. Standards bodies are also incorporating regulations into their normative standards, or seeking to make their standards available as digital public goods that aid interoperability and scale market participation. 
• Where there are known gaps across national borders, multilateral organisations are building global or industry-specific platforms and tools that enable data and service sharing or that promote and facilitate interoperability between systems.
• Non-profits, private organisations and open source projects are also building tooling, and providing open standards and open data models for others to use under creative commons and open licences as digital public goods contributions to their sector.  

With regulations and standards in place and new digital public goods and infrastructure under development, digital ecosystems are emerging that form a web of relationships amongst stakeholders in ways that were more often siloed or independent prior to digital transformation. There are three types of ecosystems that operate simultaneously:

• A global digital ecosystem: This occurs in sectors like the supply chain and logistics, where cross-border transactions are common. Digital solutions need to use standards and common digital tools and infrastructure to prevent barriers to trade, fragmentation, or duplication.
• A country or region-wide ecosystem: This occurs when there are specific regulations that are required in a specific geographic region (such as at the country or regional level) that requires additional digital tooling and infrastructure to enable regulatory compliant transactions within a country or region.
• An organisation's own ecosystem: In this new digital transformation era, organisations act as platforms, not just making end products and services available but also making digital components like datasets and service functionalities available to others who can build their own solutions. The organisation has greater say over who can participate in their ecosystem and can set their own rules for engagement, but in regulated industry sectors, each of these ecosystems will still have to align and comply with the geographic or global ecosystem context.

New ways of operating in digital environments: the ecosystem mindset

For stakeholders within any industry sector, this has all led to a fundamental transformation in operations. In this new digital environment core business roles and the mission of any organisation needs to be reconsidered:

• You need to be more aware of a broader range of regulations, not just for their industry sector but for data privacy and protection and cybersecurity as well.
• You need to understand what standards are being adopted (or even mandated) in your industry and to conform to those, or to participate in helping develop and adopt standards.
• You can no longer build a linear value chain or manufacturing pipeline for their products and services: in a digital setting you might compose services from other providers (such as integrating  payments functionality from an external provider into your digital channels), or you may rely on data from other providers. Under many regulatory requirements, you may also need to collect and share data more frequently with regulators or other actors in your value chain.
• Conversely, this also means that you could be providing your data and services as composable components to other organisations. You may end up with a mix of end products and services you build (using data and digital services from other stakeholders) as well as providing the components of your same products and services  to others so they can also build solutions.