You asked, We Answered: Questions on Ecosystems with Dartmouth’s Ron Adner

Drop in on the chat portion of last week’s Friday Fireside Chat with Dartmouth Professor Ron Adner, in which we discuss the concepts from his new book, “Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend and Deliver in a Changing World.” Here are responses to the questions that came through on the chat.

Ron Adner’s latest book is chock a block full of concepts, frameworks, and examples that lead you to rethink the taken for granted assumptions about what happens in business, by looking through an ecosystem lens. For instance, why is TomTom still a viable business in light of Google and Apple literally giving away for free what generated all their revenue? Why did Spotify have to trim back its plans to become an intermediary between artists and audience? Why was Lexmark, a printing company, able to survive the decimation of the printing business? Why did Satya Nadella put Microsoft in the position of being a valued partner when that eluded Steve Ballmer? Read on to explore some of the questions asked by our audience.

Defining an ecosystem and the threats within it

Question: How do you define an ecosystem, in your words and experience?

This is described in detail in Chapter 1 of the book, which you can download for free at this link.

Before you get to defining an ecosystem, it’s important to understand a few other concepts first. The place to start is with an understanding of the value to be created by the ecosystem, or the value proposition. The formal definition I use is:

A value proposition is defined by the benefit that the end consumer is supposed to receive from your efforts.

Although this definition may sound simple, there are some key strategic choices implied by it. The first is who your end customer is. In the case of Kodak, one of the examples used in the book, the value proposition revolved around the “Kodak moment” — an event with particular resonance that a consumer wanted to relive and share through images. The core Kodak customer in the home market was the customer who wanted to both capture the images and revisit them when they were put in an album or displayed elsewhere. Where most analyses of the Kodak…