Business Ecosystem Modeling Tool
The Business Ecosystem Modeling Tool maps every player around a business, customers, suppliers, competitors, regulators and complementors, so you can see where a partnership could work and where a disruption might come from.
Lines fan out from the business at the centre to customers, suppliers, competitors, regulators and complementors positioned around it.
Reach for this when…
- You keep being surprised by moves from companies you never thought of as relevant.
- You want to find partnership opportunities but only ever look at direct competitors.
- A regulatory change hit you sideways because nobody was tracking that stakeholder.
How to run it
- List every stakeholder in your orbit: customers, suppliers, competitors, regulators, complementors.
- Map the relationships and dependencies between them, not just their relationship to you.
- Look for where two stakeholders' interests could combine into a collaboration.
- Flag where a shift in one stakeholder's behaviour would ripple through to you.
- Use the map to prioritise where to invest attention and relationships.
A worked example
Situation. Lin Mei-hua ran a tea growers' collective, Qingshan Tea Growers, in Taichung, Taiwan, and had only ever mapped competitors, missing that a logistics partner two steps removed controlled who got to market fastest.
Applied. She mapped the full ecosystem, including regulators, input suppliers, logistics partners and competitors' complementors, and spotted an opening to co-invest in a shared cold-chain facility with a neighbouring collective.
Result. The shared facility cut spoilage losses in half and gave both collectives a bargaining position with buyers they'd never had alone.
The catch
The map is only as good as the stakeholders you think to include, and the ones you miss are usually the ones that surprise you later. It also goes stale fast in a fast-moving industry, and a big visual map can create false confidence that you've captured the whole picture when you've only captured your current view of it.
If the map only has your direct competitors and customers on it, you haven't mapped the ecosystem, you've mapped the obvious bit.