Creating of company ecosystems for digital platforms

With 7 billion people and more than 30 billion devices connected to the internet by 2020, we’re living in a transitional period where businesses and consumers are trying to make sense of the interconnectivity of people and technology. When we founded TJIP in 1999, we created a vision of bringing business platforms to life. Now, 18 years later, we’re starting to see pieces of our vision come together as the digital revolution shows no signs of slowing down.

These advances in technology and the increasing globalization have changed the way we think about businesses bringing forward the idea of business ecosystems - a biological concept used to explain the interconnectivity between suppliers, distributors, customers, competitors, and government agencies and other entities.

Bringing platforms to life, our vision, became the foundation of business ecosystems that foster further innovation as they bring people and applications together in digital communities. Within these communities, businesses from different industries or connected niches come together driven by strategies, common goals and shared interest, creating hundreds of ecosystems.

At TJIP, we’re on a mission to help create and manage these business ecosystems by putting people first and using our smart business platforming model for funding, developing, and maintaining complex high-risk software environments. As an extension of this, we’ll be creating a series of articles where we share our knowledge and experience on the topics of digital communities, technology and innovation, and funding. We see these three directions as the main pillars of successful business ecosystems.

Digital Communities

In the context of technologized business environments, there are always two communities that we consider to be important to our core business. The first is a community made up of our customers, partners, vendors and why not the end-users of our solutions. Each of them has a different relationship with our business ecosystem but they share a common trait - they use our expertise, channels and applications to achieve their goals. The second community is an internal one, comprised of our teams. They have individual goals to realize, such as developing certain skills or innovating in their fields of work, and they use our business processes, frameworks and tools to that end.

All these people come together in a web of relationships that are enabled by technology applications. Companies need to understand that the diversity of an ecosystem and the roles that people, businesses and things play is never a static one. Instead, it changes and evolves depending on the situation. One example of a community coming together to create a business ecosystem is VGZ, a health insurance provider in the Netherlands. The company builds partnerships with hospitals and other healthcare institutions to further innovation and leverage the use of good practices in the medical field to improve patient care.

Great breakthroughs happen in this type of communities where business ecosystems integrate different channels, processes, and applications for one single unified goal: people success.

Technology and innovation

Although banking is considered as somewhat of a slower industry when it comes to technology and innovation, that is not the case for Denmark-based Danske Bank. The company proved to be a true innovator when deciding to use an ecosystem of partners and businesses to create a system that was easy to use, intuitive and full service. The online portal, called Simple, combined customer data, such as finances, with house market listings. Based on that, it offered an estimate of taxes, as well as heating and electricity costs associated with buying a home. The bank went on to offer a financing arm and “journey aggregator,” which ties users into an ecosystem of realtors and information and service providers.

It’s this type of companies that we believe will redefine business models within their ecosystems, because they recognize the importance of technology must-haves such as business intelligence solutions, cloud computing and analytics and make use of the community-driven innovation to reach their goals.

Although not all high-performing companies can afford to develop in-house applications on top of these technologies, they can still remain competitive with the right outside partners. For companies struggling to keep up with technical complexities, legacies and fragmentations, smart business platforms are an imperative. We believe that these platforms are the perfect foundation to keep up with the fast cycle of innovation because what’s state of the art today may already be obsolete tomorrow.

Funding

None of this progress is possible without investment. Bringing communities together to push the boundaries of technology in these business ecosystems can only be done by mutual support. Every participant in the ecosystem has a role to play and some kind of value to provide,

Making big technology investments in challenging business environments isn’t easy for any company, regardless of its size. Internal and external politics, complex decision-making structures, and technology innovation uncertainties cause business-case uncertainties and irresponsible delays.

Our motto is: put your money where your mouth is. That’s why we chose to invest in existing and new business platforms initiatives that inspire us. Because in today’s environment, claiming to care about the importance of business platforms is only perceived as a lip service. That’s not enough. We believe the right business platforms should be “powered by TJIP,” providing the ability to execute through funding vision and sharing risk.  

These three dimensions are at the basis of creating and managing these business ecosystems. Companies that do not work toward understanding how they work risk falling into a participatory role only, enabling other competitors or partners to take the leadership role and define the rules for engagement in that ecosystem.

“A future-focused digital strategy is the key to managing this disruption and exploiting opportunity. IT leaders will need to be prepared for what’s on the horizon by adapting their thinking, methods and technologies to support the fluidic change of the digital future.”

Jamie Popkin, vice president and Gartner Fellow via

We look forward to discussing them at length and what they mean for tomorrow’s business leaders in our upcoming blog articles. Make sure you’re subscribed to our newsletter to be notified when we publish a new post.