We analyze the role and effect of ecosystem leadership understood as the exercise of effort towards others with the purpose of establishing and maintaining an ecosystem around a focal systemic innovation. While there has been much attention to the firms that sponsor ecosystems in the ecosystem literature, ecosystem leaders are usually characterized in an atheoretical manner, and the emphasis is on, leadership in existing ecosystems, thus neglecting the role leadership might play in ecosystem emergence. We clarify and provide theoretical grounding for the important role of leadership in emerging and maturing ecosystems. Building on transaction cost economics, we conceptualize an ecosystem as a governance structure that enables and sustains coordination and cooperation among multiple economic agents towards a focal innovative value proposition. Our basic argument is that the emergence of such an ecosystems is hampered by coordination and cooperation problems which markets and the price system cannot solve by itself. Resolving these problems requires assistance, and such assistance is what we call ecosystem leadership. To further characterize the exercise of leadership we use Teece’s tripartite dynamic capabilities scheme. Leadership enables ecosystem emergence through three externally-oriented dynamic capabilities: facilitating the formation of a shared vision (sensing), inducing others to make ecosystem-specific investments (seizing) and engaging in ad hoc problem solving to create and maintain stability (reconfiguring/transforming). The latter capability in particular often continues to be important in a mature ecosystem. We provide a characterization of these capabilities and argue that the ecosystem leader role in a mature ecosystem likely stems from having successfully exercised these capabilities and that their exercise also puts the leader in a prime position for value capture. We discuss implications of our arguments for ecosystem theories, for managers and for policy makers.
Message from Peter Jones in the Systemic Design Group on LinkedIn:
The board of the Systemic Design Association is pleased to announce that Volume 1 of Contexts – The Systemic Design Journal is now available online, with a collection of five distinctive articles and an editorial, in online and PDF formats. We first announced the journal project at RSD10 and showed the first articles in press at RSD11, and it’s now live as of today. Please find the journal page at https://lnkd.in/gvbApvfq and the articles at https://lnkd.in/gaGMGzyq We are actively seeking articles for Volume 2 (2023). Contexts is a continuous publishing process, and includes everything published within the year as the volume. New research and rigorous practice papers from authors in relevant fields are invited to submit to Contexts today. Manuscripts can be submitted online via the familiar process of the EasyChair conference site (which has a reviewer’s backend). Special thanks to the SDA Publications team (Silvia Barbero, Josina Vink, Amina Pereno, and especially co-designer Cheryl May – who is now mostly done with a week of final build) Thanks for support and guidance throughout the near-year development period.
oldeuropeanculture on Twitter https://twitter.com/serbiaireland/status/1622272014332444674?s=12&t=9XUuE_CTrnYOGQHUgWwp9A
“Thread: My favourite example of a (group) reality evolution is a story about my son and the Secret Army of Super Children. It all started last year when I mistakenly showed my 7 year old son Ghost Busters film, thinking we will all have a great laugh together…”
Thread:
My favourite example of a (group) reality evolution is a story about my son and the Secret Army of Super Children.
It all started last year when I mistakenly showed my 7 year old son Ghost Busters film, thinking we will all have a great laugh together… pic.twitter.com/tdl19iFOCp
One of the concepts that seems hard to grasp with regards to Cybernetics is the idea of “informational closure”. This idea was introduced by Ross Ashby as “informational tightness”. Ashby defined Cybernetics as the study of systems that are open to energy but closed to information and control – systems that are “information-tight”. Just like something that is described as water-tight, where water does not enter it from outside, information-tight refers to the condition where information does not enter it from outside.
Ashby also said that when a machine breaks, it changes its mind. Ashby referred to “machine” as a collection of parts that interact on one another and an “organization” as the specific way they are put together. For example, when a user pushes on a button, a door opens. The machine in this case is the button together with the wiring that can interact…
Chapter 4 on “Process philosophy” follows after Chapter 3 on “The Systems Idea”. For context here’s an outline of the sections on the philosophy Chapter 3.
3.1 The Meaning of ‘Systems Philosophy’
3.2 The Boundary Concept
3.3 The ‘Enemies’ of Systems Thinking: Mechanism, Reductionism and Subject/Object Dualism
One of the things that make complexity science so fascinating is the diversity of the systems that it applies to. In this series so far, you’ve learnt about everything from ecologies to economies, tipping points in ecologies and economies, to power and influence in the 1400s, and even the spread of coronavirus in the lungs and the thing that brings all of these different topics together is complexity. This means that we can study one system to help us understand other systems — including bees.
In today’s episode, Orit Peleg, Faculty at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, explains how bees self-organise and produce sophisticated behaviour. In this case, you’ll hear how thousands of bees can work out where their queen is at any given point.
Systems Community of Inquiry 
You must be logged in to post a comment.