Jacobides' Business Strategy for a Shifting Landscape
Jacobides' ecosystem lens asks where value is shifting across an industry's boundaries and who is capturing the bottleneck, so you can pick a defensible role before the shift finishes.
The ecosystem map moves from where value is shifting to the role you choose to defend.
Reach for this when…
- A platform or aggregator is quietly sitting between you and your customer.
- Your industry's boundaries are blurring and you are not sure which side you are on.
- A new entrant is growing fast in an adjacent space and you cannot tell if it threatens you.
How to run it
- Map the ecosystem: who touches the customer, the data, and the money.
- Track where margin and control are migrating, not just where revenue sits today.
- Find the bottleneck: the one activity nobody else can easily replace.
- Decide your role: own the bottleneck, complement it, or exit before it closes on you.
- Reposition in stages, testing each move before committing capital.
A worked example
Situation. Mwansa Chileshe ran Kwacha Logistics, a mid-sized delivery network in Lusaka, Zambia, moving parcels for small merchants who booked jobs by phone.
Applied. She mapped the ecosystem and saw two national super-apps quietly becoming the merchants' first call, controlling the booking and the payment while Kwacha Logistics's riders did the work. She rebuilt the business to plug into those apps as the reliable fulfilment layer instead of competing with them for the booking.
Result. Bookings through her old channel dropped but rose sharply through the super-apps. Kwacha Logistics kept the part of the chain it was genuinely best at and stopped bleeding cash trying to own the customer relationship.
The catch
The framework is a diagnosis, not a plan, and it is easy to see a bottleneck that has already moved by the time you act on it. It also assumes you can read the ecosystem accurately, which takes real fieldwork, not a workshop afternoon. Get the boundary wrong and you reposition into a role someone else already owns.
If you cannot name who controls the bottleneck today, you have not finished the map, you have guessed.
Origin: Michael G. Jacobides