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Ecosystem design practices: Roles and positioning in a digital open ecosystem
At Platformable, we support organisations to take an ecosystem design approach. We have mapped out ecosystem models: a generalist open ecosystem model, and specific models for some of the sectors we are more active in:
- Open banking/open finance
- Health
- Intellectual property
- Traceability in supply chain management.
Understanding open ecosystems and how value flows
Our ecosystem models are somewhat unique. In general, ecosystem models map the relationships between various stakeholders. We think this is essential and have defined taxonomies for the different stakeholder groupings, and have a taxonomy of relationships (co-create, collaborate, complement, compete, and coordinate) that can describe the relationships between the stakeholders. But we go a step further and also include core ecosystem components in our models.
Researchers like Cennamo and Zhu (2023)1, for example, talk about open ecosystems as a complex web of interrelationships between stakeholders, but also acknowledge the complementarities (such as API infrastructure and contracts between stakeholders) and governance models (such as regulations and data governance norms) that make up the ecosystem. Others2 often describe ecosystems as a combination of stakeholders and artefacts (APIs, open source, governance models, trust frameworks, and so on). Our model seeks to place API and data governance, standards and data models, policies and regulations, and value enablers like developer experience resources, security and privacy, and digital readiness as components alongside the stakeholders3. While we could just include the organisations that oversee these components, we found that when thinking through ecosystem design and the opportunities to influence, our clients need to see these essential components so we have found that it is more helpful for discussions to clearly show them as components in a digital ecosystem.
That is, our ecosystem maps are a combination of the digital public infrastructure4 and the relationships between ecosystem stakeholders.
Positioning within an open ecosystem
In a digital ecosystem, stakeholders often sit in multiple positions: for example, in the open banking ecosystem, a bank may be:
- an API provider
- part of a standards body organization,
- an API consumer (for example, we hear banks use another bank’s account information APIs where a customer has given consent in order to make loan approval assessments), and
- a tools provider that packages internal tooling created as open source technologies for others to use.
U.S. bank Capital One, for example, sits in all of these positions. In Europe, ABN AMRO is a good example of an ecosystem stakeholder that takes on these multiple positions.
A taxonomy of open ecosystem positions
We found it useful to group and categorise various positions within an open ecosystem. This is a challenging task, as some regulations may specifically define roles for data stakeholders in a particular way (controller/processor for example from the EU General Data Protection Regulation) while others group users in specific ways (European Deforestation Regulation for example refers to importers, traders, retailers and brands but then specifies that the entity that first needs to collect and provide data for compliance would be called the operator, regardless of whether they are an importer, trader, etc). Others are reticent to use terms like data owners as it suggests that data is owned by a single entity who has consensual rights over use, and prefer terms like data holders, and so on.
Our best thinking on ecosystem positions seeks to avoid this level of specific definition by recognising the types of functionalities that may be performed in the position within an ecosystem.
| Platformable taxonomy of positions | Platformable Definition |
|---|---|
| API and Data Providers | Providers make services available through APIs, for example, by creating access to datasets via APIs or by enabling services to be integrated via APIs. Other labels often given to stakeholders in this positioning: API providers, Data holders, Data controllers, Data product owners |
| Governments, Regulators and Policy Bodies | Stakeholders that take a lead role in setting requirements, rules of engagement, and mandating participation in an open ecosystem. |
| Standards bodies | Stakeholders that support interoperability by defining industry standards and data models that are used by other stakeholders when building APIs, sharing data, or certifying stakeholders |
| Digital public infrastructure | These are the non-stakeholder elements of an ecosystem and include: data governance models, regulations, standards and data models, and so on. These are the artefacts that are used by stakeholders to participate and exchange value in an open ecosystem. |
| Value enablers | These are factors that have the potential to magnify or restrict the flow of value in an open ecosystem. Characteristics like the level of community digital readiness, industry digital velocity, security and privacy, and the ease for developers to consume and integrate of APIs and datasets are all characteristics that will either increase or slow down the capacity for an open digital ecosystem to bloom. |
| API and Data consumers | Stakeholders that use APIs and datasets from API and Data providers to create new products and services, as well as use internally for workflows, automation, AI training and so on. Other labels often given to stakeholders in this positioning: API developers, data processors |
| Tools providers and consultants | Stakeholders that provide tooling and support to other ecosystem stakeholders, most notably API providers and consumers to assist them in leveraging digital ecosystem infrastructure to participate more fully in the open ecosystem. Usually, these providers and consultants provide tooling to create better APIs, or to build digital products and services, but it also includes consultants that provide ecosystem design and policy services and so on. (For example, at Platformable, we have been engaged in projects that analyse the policy and regulatory context so that stakeholders can better understand how to participate in an open ecosystem, as well as more directly providing tooling such as data governance and API tools such as linters to assist clients improve their API and dataset production and consumption.) |
| Industry and consumer associations | Stakeholders that represent industry or community members and participate in policy and member advocacy to ensure that their constituents are protected and able to participate fully in an open ecosystem. |
| End users | Users of digital products and services that have been built by API and data consumers. (Sometimes API and data consumers are also end users, for example, when a business consumes APIs to enable workflow automation, they are both consuming the API and the end user.) Other labels often given to stakeholders in this positioning: Where end users are contributing their own data that is then used to provide the product/service, they are sometimes referred to as Data subjects. |
| Indirect impacts | Wider benefits or negative impacts from digital open ecosystems include society (eg. greater consumer choice, ease of use, digital divide impacts, greater participation or exclusion of some populations,); the economy (greater economic benefits from faster service delivery and less physical waiting times, greater efficiencies in processes, greater employment from scaling digital businesses, greater tax revenue from successful digital businesses, wider inequalities, increased costs for access, etc); and the environment (less waste, greater or lesser efficient use of natural resources including energy and water, etc). |
Understanding ecosystem positioning for ecosystem design strategy development
When taking an ecosystem design approach, then, an organisation might consider all of its positions in an ecosystem and decide which hat it is wearing when it seeks to build specific partnerships. For example, when being part of a standards body, the organisation will be looking at sharing information and contributing in a different way to how it would operate when designing a monetised API from its position as an API provider.
We have seen this also play out in digital health scenarios: there is a degree of patient health information that should be shared in aggregated anonymised form for the whole sector to help advance research, understand population health trends, support health service planning and so on. And there is some health information data that may have been generated in privately-funded research that still has value to be protected for internal innovation. Supporting health organisations, especially private companies, to think in an open ecosystem approach has often meant helping them break down those barriers where they see all data as commercially advantageous, and instead helping them understand the value of data is greater when shared and that a finer balance can be generated where, as an ecosystem stakeholder, the company can contribute some population-level health data while advancing their own proprietary research agenda.
So understanding one’s position in an ecosystem - what hat the organisation is wearing at any given time - can help guide their decisions on how to engage in relationships, what data and tooling to share, how to contribute, and so on.
This work around identifying one’s position in an ecosystem is often use case based: it arises when designing products and services or deciding to participate in ecosystem wider activities like contributing to standards.
Broader participatory roles in an open ecosystem
Ecosystem stakeholders can also make decisions about what broader role they want to play in an ecosystem. We have identified four key roles: orchestrator, facilitator, participant and funder. These reflect the four roles that an entity can play in an ecosystem, regardless of their positioning.
However, we also describe two other labels: stakeholder/actor and curator/designer. For definitional purposes, we clarify that we use stakeholder or actor to refer to any entity operating within an open ecosystem, regardless of their positioning or role. We also wanted to describe a newly emerging role within an organisation: the implementer who would help oversee a stakeholder’s actions after it had selected what role it wanted to play. This is the curator/designer.
| Platformable taxonomy of roles | Platformable Definition |
|---|---|
| Stakeholder/Actor | Any entity that operates within an ecosystem, regardless of their position or role in an ecosystem. |
| Orchestrator | A stakeholder that chooses to take a leadership and guidance role within an open ecosystem by contributing to standards, developing guides and resources for anyone to use, offering training, or building some services and tooling. These may be provided at a price or may restrict some resources to only be available for clients/participants/members but an orchestrator will include some strategies and tactics that seek to contribute to the development of the open ecosystem for all stakeholders, beyond their own network. |
| Facilitator | A stakeholder that supports their own network members to participate fully in an open ecosystem. They may perform similar activities as the orchestrator role, but are primarily focused on ensuring their own clients/partners/members are able to participate in the ecosystem, rather than fostering external stakeholder participation as well. They are more likely to only provide tooling or training to their own members, clients or partners and may be working to represent only those interests when contributing to ecosystem activities such as standards creation or regulations. |
| Participant | A stakeholder that has one or more specific positions within an ecosystem and is seeking to focus their activities on working from that position effectively (for example, some data providers may also be data consumers). For example, the bulk of API consumers that are building products for end users are participants: they are not interested or involved in regulations, standards, or so on and are seeking primarily to generate value for their own organisation and their end users/customers in an open ecosystem. |
| Funder | A stakeholder that contributes funding to support the establishment, maintenance or growth of an open ecosystem. This can be a philanthropic body, a government or regulatory authority, or even a large enterprise. Funders often take a step back from influencing the open ecosystem directly in a way that differentiates from the activities an orchestrator might implement, although sometimes there is some overlap, especially when funding comes from governments and regulatory authorities who are providing investment and influencing policies and regulations. For example, regulatory authorities have often provided funding or challenges for participants to create in sandbox environments, and are then using the learnings from sandbox participation to refine data sharing and privacy protocols, or to guide future regulations or processes and establishing trust frameworks. |
| Ecosystem Curator or Ecosystem Designer | Internally to an entity, a person or team that has responsibility for mapping, analysing and planning engagement in an open ecosystem could be referred to as an ecosystem curator or ecosystem designer. This person or team would then take on the strategic responsibilities of supporting the entity to take on its chosen role as defined above. |
Literature analysed to assist with taxonomy definitions
We have previously used terms like “leader” and “facilitator” to describe roles organisations can take in an ecosystem, but we found that some organisations were uncomfortable with describing themselves as leaders even though they sought to contribute more widely to the ecosystem beyond their own network.
| Academic and industry literature labels used to describe ecosystem roles | Source and link | Platformable alignment | Reason for differences |
|---|---|---|---|
| Driver | A Survey of Roles and Responsibilities in Digital Business Ecosystems | Orchestrator | Tsai and Zdravkovic’s paper groups Leadership Company, Keystone and Ecosystem Driver into this one category of Driver, referring to them as having “the characteristics of organising, guiding, and looking over all actors within an ecosystem and concern value creation and balance” |
| Aggregator | A Survey of Roles and Responsibilities in Digital Business Ecosystems | Facilitator | As above, the researchers note some similarities with Driver categorisation but note that their category of aggregator: “shares some similarities with [Driver] as it organises, in terms of aggregating and combining multiple resources within an ecosystem into products and services. However, it does not deal with leading a whole ecosystem with all involved actors.” |
| Modular Producer | A Survey of Roles and Responsibilities in Digital Business Ecosystems | Participant | The authors note that the majority of those participating in an ecosystem are ‘modular producers” as they share “similarities as they pertain to the development of capabilities and offering of resources, such as products, services, technologies, knowledge, financial funding, etc., in an ecosystem.” |
| Governor | A Survey of Roles and Responsibilities in Digital Business Ecosystems | Orchestrator | Tsai and Zdravkovic separate the governance roles of government and regulatory agencies into a group they call “Governor”, which we would see as a position within an ecosystem. The authors reference that “since they all share the characteristic of defining normative contexts, such as laws, policies, guidelines, and mechanisms, in an ecosystem” they are grouped as Governor, but in our experience, areas like standards definitions, data sharing trust frameworks, and even data governance norms can arise from other stakeholders as well as official governing roles, hence we see any ecosystem stakeholder can choose to try and take an orchestrator role and contribute to these “normative contexts”. |
| Orchestrator | Orchestrating Value Co-creation in Business Ecosystems | Orchestrator | “From a normative standpoint, orchestrating value co-creation implies continuously collecting, processing, filtering, sharing and updating the most relevant aspects of (infinite) digitised information with other actors of the ecosystem. This guarantees the most efficient and effective use and allocation of the community’s scarce (finite) physical resources in terms of economic, social and ecological value. The business as an orchestrator of value co-creation takes a perspective far beyond its formal boundaries. Hence, rather than limiting its business model to the value generated through its hierarchically controlled, unilaterally produced and marketed product and service offerings, an orchestrator takes an ecosystem-oriented perspective. In this contextualised, dynamic network-like structure, the company’s business model is characterised by rather heterarchical controlled, multilateral co-created product and service offerings.” |
| Orchestrator | Roles and relationships in the digital financial ecosystem | Orchestrator | While Solvinity further breaks down Orchestrator into positions that reflect specific tasks like regulatory oversight, etc, the overall definition of Orchestrator suggests it could be taken on by anyone in an ecosystem that chooses a leadership role: “The role of an orchestrator in a digital ecosystem is to attract new actors, facilitate interactions between actors, resolve tensions, etc. These are all activities in the interest of the ecosystem and aren’t motivated by individual interest.” |
| Platform Leader | Industry Platforms and Ecosystem Innovation | Orchestrator | Gawler’s piece, while more focused on a single business’ ecosystem, describes a maturity model of platform leadership that starts with ecosystem design principles that might be adopted by a participant, and then as they build success in fostering an ecosystem around their platform they would play roles in encouraging partners and others towards interoperability and co-creation (facilitator) and then to influencing and helping “Make long-term investments in industry coordination activities, whose fruits will create value for the whole ecosystem”. |
| Digital Ecosystem Curator | The emerging role of the digital ecosystem curator | Ecosystem Curator or Ecosystem Designer | No difference. This excellent piece describes three key functions of an ecosystem curator: to build and manage partnerships, to leverage data, and to ensure the focus remains on business value. |
| Data Ecosystem Designer | The Data Ecosystem Designer: Designing the Future of Digital Public Goods | Ecosystem Curator or Ecosystem Designer | No difference, although Data.org specifically focuses on the role of an ecosystem designer supporting digital products within a digital public goods open ecosystem. |
Applying roles and positions to ecosystem design practices
Your organisation will want to undertake ecosystem design practices for a number of reasons:
- You can speed up your product development and route to value by leveraging existing resources and by understanding the broader context (for example, you can see what regulations impact you, what standards are most commonly used, what data governance models are in place for others that you could draw on, what partners to collaborate with, what digital tools you could adopt, and so on)
- You can reduce implementation roadblocks by better understanding potential challenges and opportunities (again, what regulations you may need to recognise and how compliance reporting is undertaken, whether certain markets are less digitally ready, what use cases are unmet, and what areas are already mature or over-concentrated with partners, and which areas are opportunities)
- You can collaborate to eradicate duplication and minimise fragmentation of data and services by adopting industry standards for interoperability, focusing on your core business opportunities, and partnering with others who may already offer datasets or APIs that you can use in your workflows and product development.
But to start an ecosystem design approach, you need to:
- Define what role you would like to play (for now) in your open ecosystem.
- Understand your positioning in the ecosystem.
- Take action that aligns with your role and leverages your positioning.
Define what role you would like to play (for now) in your open ecosystem
Define what role you want to play, allocate resources and nominate an internal ecosystem curator/designer or team to be responsible for coordinating your activities. Start to define what value you want your organisation to generate from participating in the ecosystem.
For example, we have worked with large enterprises and multilateral organisations that want to influence regulation, contribute to interoperable standards development, and build common catalogues of all the APIs that are available within an ecosystem. These players have started their work immediately from an orchestrator role. Others have an industry association role and want to ensure that as an open ecosystem emerges from a regulatory context, and that their members are supported to work collaboratively. These organisations have taken a facilitator role. Others simply want to create a product or service in an open ecosystem and want to understand the landscape before they build. These enter as participants.
Each of these organisations has defined the value they expect from taking on that role and selected activities that reflect both their role and their chosen path to generating that value as quickly as possible.
Understand your positioning in the ecosystem
Map the ecosystem and understand what positions your organisation plays. Identify the internal stakeholders who are responsible for overseeing these particular positions. As we have stated, a bank for example may play be an API provider, an API consumer (consuming APIs from other banks), a contributor to standards, and a creator of open source digital tools. We find in some cases the positioning of API provider and creator of open source digital tools may be co-located: some open source tools are created because the API provider developer team is releasing some infrastructure they have built for their API delivery (but not always). But often the API consumer is a completely different role: it may be someone in the credit line of business that uses account information bank APIs to assess creditworthiness of new customers, or someone from corporate accounts that consumes APIs from fintech to feed into ERP systems, or so on. Often the standards collaborator works from a legal or compliance department. The ecosystem curator/design team should seek to involve those stakeholders in discussions.
Take action that aligns with your role and leverages your positioning
For each strategic action identified when deciding on your ecosystem role, identify “what hat you will be wearing” if you engage, that is, your positioning. In some cases, you may assess multiple positions before deciding which position to act from. Assess the ecosystem map, engage with internal stakeholders and decide how to leverage the current ecosystem dynamics to generate the value you seek. Start identifying how you will track whether you are successful and monitor as you move forward to stay on track or to alter course as you progress.
Article references
Zhu, Feng, and Carmelo Cennamo. "Toward a Better Understanding of Open Ecosystems: Implications for Policymakers." Working Paper, November 2023.
For example Kornyshova, et al 2023: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877050923016186; Valdez de Leon 2023: http://doi.org/10.22215/timreview/1260; and Burkhalter et al 2021: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354935758_Orchestrating_Value_Co-Creation_in_Business_Ecosystems
Perhaps what is missing from our model is an overarching container or boundary that describes who funds the initial establishment and maintenance of the ecosystem, an area we are researching and investigating in greater depth at present.
As referenced by Berjon in his excellent piece The Public Interest Internet, we use India Stack's definition of public digital infrastructure (the second half of the definition veers a little into our open ecosystem definition when it discusses who uses these shared utilities): "A set of shared digital utilities powered by interoperable open standards/specifications operated under a set of enabling rules (laws/regulations/policies) having open, transparent, and participatory governance with open access to individuals and/or institutions addressing sovereignty and control built as a set of digital building blocks (not as monolithic solutions) to drive innovation, inclusion, and fair competition at scale."
Mark Boyd
DIRECTORmark@platformable.com
based in Barcelona
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