Crowdsourcing the ecosystem’s expectations: a decision-making process to manage the unmanageable

Abstract

Purpose

The author warns that nowadays a company must learn to be “co-productive” with an app developer community, a supplier community, a content community, an advocacy community or a customer ecosystem in order to stay competitive through continuous innovation. Leaders need new tools to promote informed decisions.

Design/methodology/approach

The article shows how companies monitoring dynamic ecosystem change can develop crowd-based reporting scorecards to guide decision making.

Findings

Increasingly it is the innovations and expertise of the ecosystem, not the talents and resources of the firm, that are crucial to its future wealth generation. But many of the consequences of ecosystem change are, in fact, unmanageable in any traditional sense. An experimental way to identify the uncertainty produced by a dynamic ecosystem offers decision support.

Practical implications

The uncertainty monitoring experiments described in this article can clarify the risk levels and the need for preparatory investments. They offer a high level view of the dynamics of the new market ecosystem environment.

Originality/value

This article offers cutting-edge insights for managers struggling to make decisions about investments related to the dynamic ecosystem of users, suppliers, partners and customers in their companies’ markets.

Citation

Shaughnessy, H. (2014), "Crowdsourcing the ecosystem’s expectations: a decision-making process to manage the unmanageable", Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 42 No. 3, pp. 3-8. https://doi.org/10.1108/SL-03-2014-0022