HOW DO YOU “DESIGN” A

BUSINESS ECOSYSTEM?
By Ulrich Pidun, Martin Reeves, and Maximilian Schüssler

This article is the second in a series of publica- ecosystems exhibit strategic challenges not
tions offering practical guidance on business found in other governance models, such as
ecosystems. The first article addressed the how to solve the chicken-or-egg problem of
question “Do you need a business ecosystem?”, creating a critical mass of partners and cus-
this article deals with ecosystem design, and tomers during launch and how to build a
subsequent articles will address how to man- scalable and defendable model.
age a business ecosystem and how to measure
its success over time. Moreover, business ecosystems, similar to
residential districts, cannot be entirely
If designing a traditional business model is planned and designed—they also emerge.
like planning and building a house, design- This adaptability is actually one of their
ing an ecosystem is more like developing a major strengths. However, there are some
whole residential district: more complex, key design choices you need to get right in
more players to coordinate, more layers order to increase the odds of success. These
of interaction and unintended emergent design choices are not independent; they
outcomes. must be consistent with one another and
offer a coherent overall configuration.
What makes ecosystem design distinctive is
that it requires a true system perspective. It Based on an analysis of more than 100 suc-
is not sufficient to design the value cre- cessful and failed ecosystems across sectors
ation and delivery model; the design must and geographic markets, we find that the
also explicitly consider value distribution ecosystem design challenge can be ad-
among ecosystem members. This is further dressed by working through six sequential
complicated by the limited hierarchical questions (see Exhibit 1):
control in an ecosystem and the need to
convince partners to participate, which •• What is the problem that you want to
poses specific governance challenges. And solve?
Exhibit 1 | The Six-Step Journey of Business Ecosystem Design

1 What is the problem that 2 Who needs to be part 3 What should be the initial
governance model of your
you want to solve? of your ecosystem?
ecosystem?
• Is the problem big enough? • What are the players and roles? • How open should the ecosystem be?
• Is an ecosystem the right choice? • Who should be the orchestrator? • What should the orchestrator control?
• What kind of ecosystem do you need? • How can the orchestrator motivate the
other players?

4 How can you capture 5 How can you solve the 6 How can you ensure the
the value of your ecosystem? chicken-or-egg problem? evolvability of your ecosystem?

• What should you charge? • What does it take to achieve critical mass? • How can you scale the ecosystem?
• Whom should you charge? • What is the minimum viable ecosystem? • How can you defend the ecosystem?
• Which side of the market should you • How can you expand the ecosystem?
focus on? • How can you protect against backlash?

Source: BCG Henderson Institute.

•• Who needs to be part of your The value potential from addressing an un-
ecosystem? met need is difficult to predict but poten-
tially very rewarding, because there is ini-
•• What should be the initial governance tially no offering to compete with. Who
model of your ecosystem? would have guessed 20 years ago that post-
ing selfies, photos of your food, and cat vid-
•• How can you capture the value of your eos is such a deep human need that multi-
ecosystem? billion-dollar businesses like Instagram and
YouTube could be built on them? By con-
•• How can you solve the chicken-or-egg trast, removing an existing friction is more
problem during launch? predictable. The ecosystem value proposi-
tion is a function of the size of the friction,
•• How can you ensure evolvability the share of the friction that can be elimi-
and the long-term viability of your nated by the ecosystem solution, and the
ecosystem? willingness of customers to pay for it.

Take, for example, Better Place, a startup

Step 1: What is the Problem founded in 2007 to build an innovative eco-
That You Want To Solve? system-based solution to power electric ve-
hicles (EVs). Its breakthrough idea was to
Is the Problem Big Enough? separate car and battery. In this model, the
Before you can start designing your ecosys- driver purchases a car without a battery,
tem, you must make sure that the problem while Better Place owns the battery and
that the ecosystem is supposed to solve is charges a mileage-based monthly fee for
clearly defined and large enough to justify leasing, charging, and exchanging it. In this
the high upfront investment and to con- way, Better Place could solve several funda-
vince the right partners to participate. The mental problems of existing EV offerings:
value proposition for a new ecosystem can Because Better Place owned the battery,
come from removing an existing friction the EV could be offered at a competitive
(anything that dissuades customers from price, and the risk of obsolescence and low
buying a product or service, such as high resale value due to advances in battery
cost, delay, poor quality, imperfect func- technology was eliminated.
tionality, unpredictability, and misunder-
standing or lack of trust) or from address- Because Better Place built not only
ing an unmet or new customer need. charging infrastructure but also switch sta-

Boston Consulting Group | BCG Henderson Institute 2

tions that could exchange batteries in a Is an Ecosystem the Right Choice?
matter of minutes, the problem of limited The next question that must be answered
driving range was also addressed. And fi- is whether an ecosystem is the best way to
nally, Better Place also solved the problem realize the business opportunity. Ecosys-
of electric grid capacity, because as the or- tems compete with other governance mod-
chestrator of the EV ecosystem it could bal- els, such as vertically integrated organiza-
ance the power demand from cars with tions, hierarchical supply chains, and
grid capacity. Better Place was thus able to open-market models. As we discussed in
remove substantial frictions and offer an the first article of this series (“Do You Need
enormous benefit to the world. However, a Business Ecosystem?”), an ecosystem is
as we will see, the ecosystem failed be- the preferred model in unpredictable but
cause of other weaknesses in its design. highly malleable business environments
and when high modularity of the offering
The specific value proposition of a business is combined with a high need for coordina-
ecosystem is context dependent. For exam- tion among players.
ple, frictions in traditional retail were
much higher in China than in the US, be- There are many examples of business op-
cause China had no significant retail or portunities that are not well suited for an
payments infrastructure and it was difficult ecosystem model. Who wants to fly in an
for consumers to get access to many prod- aircraft that was built by a loosely coordi-
ucts they were looking for. This explains in nated ecosystem of companies? In this
large part the success of transaction ecosys- case, the complexity and integrated nature
tems like Taobao and Tmall, which largely of the design, and the need for utmost at-
removed these frictions. tention to safety, favor an integrated model
or a hierarchical supply chain. On the other
In a similar vein, B2C ecosystems are typi- hand, many business opportunities do not
cally easier to establish than B2B ecosys- require a business ecosystem because they
tems, because many existing B2C relations can be realized in an open-market model.
suffer from relatively high transaction For example, if Saeco launches a new auto-
costs, while B2B offerings are more likely matic espresso machine, the required cof-
to be characterized by mature companies fee beans, water, and power supply are ge-
with optimized professional relationships. neric complements that consumers can
In the early 2000s, there was huge excite- purchase in the open market and then
ment about the value potential of B2B combine on their own.
marketplaces in the US, with estimated
online exchange potential of more than Sometimes the best governance model is
$5 trillion by 2005. In fact, by that year, al- not so obvious—or can change over time.
most all B2B marketplaces in the US had Zappos started as a transaction ecosystem,
disappeared. The bubble collapsed mainly matching consumers with shoe manufac-
because the problems that could be solved turers, but found that it could offer a more
through these marketplaces were just not consistent value proposition by taking full
important or big enough. control of the buyers’ experience with a
traditional hierarchical supply chain model.
Again, the situation was different in China,
where the lack of infrastructure made it What Kind of Ecosystem Do You
difficult for a business to find partners, a Need?
problem that Alibaba largely solved. How- Not all business ecosystems are created
ever, we also believe that advances in sen- equal. Some business opportunities are
sor technology, cloud computing, and data best organized as a solution ecosystem,
analytics will make it possible to address which creates and delivers a product or ser-
new and bigger problems, and IoT-based vice by coordinating various contributors.
business models will likely fuel the next Others are best set up as a transaction eco-
wave of B2B ecosystems in the coming system, which matches or links participants
decade. in a two-sided market through a (digital)

Boston Consulting Group | BCG Henderson Institute 3

 platform. And some are best organized as a that we know started either as a transac-
hybrid, combining elements of a solution tion ecosystem (Airbnb, Alibaba, LinkedIn)
and a transaction ecosystem. It is import- or as a solution ecosystem (Apple iOS,
ant to be clear about the type of ecosys- Android) and added further domains and
tem, because the types differ not only in offerings only once they were firmly
their structure but also in their purpose, established.
success factors, and value creation mecha-
nisms. The value blueprint is the basis for assign-
ing roles to the various players. A solution
ecosystem is typically characterized by a
Step 2: Who Needs to Be Part of core firm that orchestrates the offerings of
Your Ecosystem? several complementors, suppliers, and in-
termediaries (such as Better Place’s ecosys-
What Are the Players and Roles? tem in Exhibit 2). In transaction ecosys-
The initial design of a business ecosystem tems, the orchestrator role is played by the
starts with mapping the “value blueprint”: owner of a central (mostly digital) platform
the activities that are required to deliver that links producers and their suppliers
the value proposition, the links among with consumers.
them, and the responsibilities of the vari-
ous actors. The value blueprint also speci- The different roles have benefits and draw-
fies the flow of information, goods or ser- backs. The orchestrator builds the ecosys-
vices, and money through the ecosystem. tem, encourages others to join, defines
(See Exhibit 2.) standards and rules, and acts as arbiter in
cases of conflict. The broad scope of the
The design of an ecosystem should be driv- role comes with the bulk of responsibility
en by its core value proposition. The initial for ecosystem success and the sustained
value blueprint should incorporate the level of investment that is required to get
minimum number of domains (types of the ecosystem going. The orchestrator is
participants or market sides) that are need- the residual-claim holder of the ecosystem.
ed to provide this core value and expand While it has a big influence on the distribu-
over time. All examples of hybrid models tion of the value created, it must also make

Exhibit 2 | The Better Place Ecosystem’s Value Blueprint

Design
Battery manufacturer Car manufacturer

Car
Software operating
Battery system

Battery + charging
(rental fee)
Better Place Consumer

Battery
Power charging
load balancing

Battery charging/
Utilities
exchange infrastructure
Power

Flow of goods/services Flow of information

Source: BCG Henderson Institute.

Boston Consulting Group | BCG Henderson Institute 4

sure that all relevant players earn a decent petitive threat. And finally, the best candi-
profit. In return, the orchestrator can keep date is likely to be the player with the
the residual profit, which can be very highest net benefits from the ecosystem
high (Apple iOS, Microsoft Windows) but and thus a correspondingly high ability to
also negative for an extended period of shoulder the large upfront investments.
time (Uber, Lyft). Orchestrators that fail in
their responsibility to secure fair value Most companies seem to strive for the or-
sharing will sooner or later destroy their chestrator role because they fear being
ecosystems. commoditized, losing direct access to cus-
tomers, or being exploited by another or-
Who Should Be the Orchestrator? chestrator. However, being a supplier or
In many business ecosystems, the assign- complementor in a business ecosystem can
ment of the orchestrator role is clear. For be a very attractive role. Arguably, the big-
example, in most transaction ecosystems gest winners of the Californian gold rush in
the provider of the matching platform is the mid-19th century were the suppliers of
the natural orchestrator, and the roles of pots, pans, and Levi jeans. Similarly, suppli-
producers and consumers are readily ers and complementors can benefit from
assigned. Similarly, some solution ecosys- lower investment requirements and the op-
tems are built on a technical platform portunity to join the most attractive of sev-
that serves as the basis for orchestration, eral ecosystems. Or they can hedge their
such as the console of a video game ecosys- bets and participate in more than one eco-
tem or the operating system on a PC or system. In particular, if they provide im-
smartphone. portant components that represent a bot-
tleneck for the ecosystem, they can secure
However, as a new ecosystem emerges, the a substantial share of the overall profits.1
orchestrator role may be contested. Think
of the competing smart-farming ecosystems An example of a highly successful comple-
that are currently being built by equipment mentor is Adyen, a Dutch payments com-
manufacturers ( John Deere), seed and crop pany enabling global platforms to support
protection providers (Bayer-Monsanto), and all key payment methods around the
technology players (Alphabet). And who world. At the time of writing, the company
should be the orchestrator of an effective had a market cap of more than €25 billion,
ecosystem for electronic health records: had more than doubled its stock price since
health insurers, providers, IT companies, or its IPO in June 2018, and reported revenue
the government? growth of 41% in the first half of 2019 at an
EBITDA margin of 57%. Arithmetic dictates
It is important to understand that you can- that only a small minority of firms can be
not unilaterally choose to be the orchestra- orchestrators. We are convinced that many
tor. You need to be accepted by the other incumbents would be well advised to put
players in the ecosystem. In this regard, their strategic focus on finding attractive
there are four requirements for a successful complementor or supplier roles.
orchestrator of a business ecosystem. First,
the orchestrator needs to be considered an How Can the Orchestrator
essential member of the ecosystem and Motivate the Other Players?
control resources needed for its viability, Ecosystem orchestrators face the additional
such as a strong brand, customer access, or challenge of motivating the required part-
key skills. Second, the orchestrator should ners to commit and contribute to the eco-
have a central position in the ecosystem system. Ron Adner identified two import-
network, with strong interdependencies ant risks for the feasibility of an emerging
with many other players and a resulting ecosystem: co-innovation risk and adoption
high need and ability for effective coordi- risk.2
nation. Third, the orchestrator should be
perceived as a fair (or even neutral) part- Co-innovation risk stems from the fact that
ner by the other members, not as a com- developing a new or substantially im-

Boston Consulting Group | BCG Henderson Institute 5

proved value proposition is typically associ- value blueprint: adoption risk. Because of
ated with high risks for the individual re- the high interdependencies in a business
quired innovations. In the case of a ecosystem, all contributors to the overall
business ecosystem, these individual risks solution need to be ready, willing, and able
multiply because of the interdependence to participate and invest in the ecosystem.
of the different components. The probabili- A single instance of rejection is enough to
ty of technical success of an ecosystem break the entire adoption chain. For exam-
solution equals the mathematical product ple, Better Place finally failed in spite of a
of the probability of success of all required compelling value proposition because it
components, which can be very small if could not secure the participation of one
just one factor is small. important group of partners in its ecosys-
tem, the car manufacturers. It got Renault
This co-innovation risk is particularly rele- on board by guaranteeing volume and
vant for solution ecosystems, where the placing an order of 100,000 cars, four years
failure of one critical component is suffi- before it had a single customer. But Re-
cient for the entire ecosystem to fail. For nault ultimately was Better Place’s only car
example, in early 2000, Nokia and Sony Er- manufacturing partner.
icsson started a race to bring to market the
first 3G mobile phone capable of video How can you evaluate critical partners’ in-
streaming. Nokia had forecast that by 2002 centives to participate? Partners are more
more than 300 million mobile handsets likely to commit if they score high on the
would be connected to the internet. The following criteria:
actual number was 3 million; 300 million
was reached in 2008, six years later. Nokia •• High relative profit increase from
became a victim of co-innovation risk: participation
While Nokia was fast to the market and
could sell its first 3G handset in 2002, be- •• High competitive risk from non-partici-
fore Ericsson, other actors in the ecosystem pation
still had to develop solutions to fully en-
able video streaming, such as formatting •• Limited investments required for
software to fit TV images on small phones, participation
router innovations allowing mobile phone
operators to know which customer signed •• Limited risk from participation
up for which plan, and digital rights man-
agement to ensure copyright protection for •• Existing capabilities to build on
content owners. Before these innovations
were established, 3G video streaming could If some critical players show a high adop-
not be viable, rendering the device largely tion risk, you may need to reflect this in
useless. your ecosystem design with incentives for
participation. Incentives need not be only
Assessing co-innovation risk is important to monetary; they can, for instance, also in-
evaluate the overall probability of success clude access to customers or data. Ron Ad-
of the ecosystem, but also to identify the ner mentions digital cinema projectors as
bottleneck components that need most at- an example. The value proposition for re-
tention and support. Intel understood this placing analog films and projectors by digi-
challenge when the company designed its tal counterparts was generally compelling:
ecosystem and created the Intel Architec- higher resolution, better protection from
ture Lab to drive architectural progress piracy, and significant savings in the value
on the PC system and to stimulate and chain. The cost of producing a convention-
facilitate innovation on complementary al film was $2,000 to $3,000 per print, cost-
products. ing $7.5 million for a release shown on
3,000 screens. Regardless of these advan-
Even if co-innovation risk seems limited, tages, adoption risk proved to be very high
there is another challenge related to the for cinemas because the investment costs

Boston Consulting Group | BCG Henderson Institute 6

were prohibitive relative to the benefits. •• Commitment. What level of ecosys-
Despite efficiency gains, higher quality for tem-specific investments and co-special-
consumers, and more flexibility regarding ization is required? Is exclusivity
the offering, cinemas saw no need to adopt demanded or are partners allowed to
digital projectors on a large scale. Only multihome in competing ecosystems?
once the film studios established a financ-
ing scheme in which they shouldered the In practice, we can observe successful eco-
initial outlay for the projector, and studios systems with very different levels of open-
shared the benefits by paying a virtual ness, from rather restrictive (Nespresso) to
print fee per digital film screened (covering managed (video games) to very open (Airb-
~80% of the cinema investment costs), were nb). For example, the Chinese company
the incentives for adoption high enough to Haier chooses a rather open approach to-
establish the new technology on a broader ward access to its emerging “internet of
scale. food” ecosystem, which tries to integrate
players from the appliance, food, health
care, home furniture, logistics, and even en-
Step 3: What Should Be the tertainment industries to create a compre-
Initial Governance Model of hensive customer solution from buying to
Your Ecosystem? cooking, eating, storing, and cleaning. As
Zhang Ruimin, chairman of the Haier
How Open Should the group, put it, “We want to build an energet-
Ecosystem Be? ic rainforest rather than a structured
Ecosystem governance is an important de- walled garden.”
sign choice because it creates an indirect
form of control appropriate to the complex- On the other hand, Sony experienced the
ity and dynamism of an ecosystem. It es- peril of an open governance model when
tablishes the standards, rules, and process- introducing its e-reader. Alarmed by piracy
es that define an ecosystem’s formal or in the music industry, publishers were ex-
informal constitution. Governance needs to tremely concerned to protect their rights
balance two requirements for ecosystem around books. Sony did not manage to es-
success: value creation (rules of collabora- tablish a governance model to address this
tion to co-create value as an ecosystem) concern. Therefore, Amazon could conquer
and value sharing (rules and processes for the e-book market as a late entrant by es-
splitting the value among ecosystem tablishing the Kindle as a very closed plat-
players). form that loaded content only from Ama-
zon and precluded users from transferring
The single biggest governance question for books to any other device or to a printer.
an emerging ecosystem is its degree of
openness. Questions in three areas must be In some sectors, ecosystems compete on
answered: their degree of openness. For example, An-
droid broke the dominance of Apple iOS as
•• Access. Which individual partners will a mobile operating system with an open
be allowed to participate in the ecosys- governance model, while Facebook over-
tem? Which requirements do they have came the weaknesses of Myspace’s open
to fulfill in order to get access to the model by being initially very selective
platform and its resources? about who it allowed to join and establish-
ing the double-opt-in “friending” feature.
•• Participation. To what extent are
ecosystem partners invited to shape How can you find the right level of open-
the ecosystem? What is the scope, ness for your ecosystem? The decision must
detail, and strictness of the rules optimize the tradeoff between the advan-
governing this? Who decides how the tages of a more open setup and of a more
value created is distributed among closed setup. Open ecosystems can benefit
partners? from faster growth, particularly during

Boston Consulting Group | BCG Henderson Institute 7

launch. They enable greater diversity of yourself and what do you want to encour-
participants and variety of offerings and age complementors to do? A starting point
encourage decentralized innovation. Open may be your own assets and capabilities.
ecosystems tend to use the market to guide However, as Hannah and Eisenhardt ob-
their development; partners join and leave serve, “Perhaps in complex strategic set-
and adjust their offers as customer demand tings like ecosystems, strategy is more con-
and technologies evolve. sequential than initial capabilities.”

On the other hand, open ecosystems are Good ecosystem strategy may be to identi-
difficult to control and are thus best suited fy and occupy potential innovation or ca-
for products and services with limited pacity bottlenecks that can become an im-
downside and relatively low cost of failure. portant source of value. Successful
In case of high failure costs, and a corre- orchestrators claim important system con-
sponding need to limit the downside, a trol points that allow them to capture their
closed ecosystem may be the better solu- fair share of value. For example, Nest de-
tion. It allows for a more deliberate design cided to engage in alarm and monitoring
of the ecosystem and for closer control of itself because these are essential function-
partners and of the quality of the offering. alities for controlling the home. Apple
Moreover, a more closed ecosystem helps pre-installs Apple Maps on the iPhone in
the orchestrator capture value by, for ex- an attempt to oust Google Maps. And Goo-
ample, charging for access. gle uses its Google Play store to control the
otherwise very open Android ecosystem.
The right level of openness will depend on
the relative importance of the individual There are, of course, many other initial
factors, such as growth versus quality, de- governance questions. For example, when
centralized versus coordinated innovation, designing a transaction ecosystem, the plat-
and speed versus consistency of co-evolu- form orchestrator must decide whether the
tion. Competition with other existing or matching of producers and consumers
emerging ecosystems in the same sector should be done by algorithm (Uber) or by
can also play a role, because a new ecosys- users (Facebook); whether pricing should
tem needs to find a differentiated position- be based on rules and algorithms (Lending-
ing, such as the degree of openness. Club) or on offer and negotiation (eBay);
and whether curation should be done by
We have seen many ecosystems start with platform editors (Wikipedia), user feedback
a rather closed governance model in order (Airbnb), or algorithms (Google Search).
to establish high quality and open up later. These decisions depend on the specific
For example, the Q&A platform Quora context and get at the heart of the ecosys-
started as an invite-only ecosystem that tar- tem’s operating model, value creation
geted prominent technology entrepreneurs. mechanism, and differentiation.
By building this dense and exclusive net-
work of experts, Quora was able to develop We will address the question of ecosystem
an inventory of high-quality content that governance in a future article in this series.
then made it easy to attract a broader audi-
ence when the platform later opened up.
However, there are also examples of eco- Step 4: How Can You Capture
systems that start as open to gain traction the Value of Your Ecosystem?
and become more closed later, such as the
knowledge ecosystems investigated by Järvi What Should You Charge?
and her colleagues.3 When the basic setup of the business eco-
system is defined, the next big design step
What Should the Orchestrator is to find a way to translate the benefits
Control? that the ecosystem creates for its customers
As an orchestrator, you face an additional into value for its participants. Monetization
design question: What do you want to do is one of the biggest challenges of the eco-

Boston Consulting Group | BCG Henderson Institute 8

system orchestrator, which must balance trator has a number of choices, such as
three competing objectives: maximizing charging all participants, charging only one
the size of the total pie; enabling all im- side of the market while subsidizing the
portant domains (groups of participants) of other side, or charging most users the full
the ecosystem to earn enough profit to en- price while subsidizing selected marquee
sure their ongoing participation; capturing users or particularly price-sensitive users.
its own fair share of the value.
Our analysis showed that mispricing on
To achieve this, the orchestrator must de- one side of the platform is a key reason for
sign not only the value proposition for the failure, in particular in the launch phase
customer but also the value-sharing model, (see the next section). For example, Table8,
by defining the value proposition for each a platform for last-minute reservations in
group of relevant stakeholders. At the same sold-out restaurants, failed because it
time, the orchestrator must make sure to charged the wrong side of the market. The
own critical control points, such as access company learned the hard way that few
to the customer, products with many inter- guests were willing to pay $20 or more for
faces, or critical services. a reservation in a high-profile restaurant.
Competitors like OpenTable that charged
In solution ecosystems, value capture is restaurants for their reservation service
typically rather straightforward because turned out to be more successful. Similarly,
the solution that the ecosystem creates can eBay had to learn that its established mod-
be sold as a product or service. The orches- el of charging users to list products and ser-
trator can in addition capture value from vices did not work in China because the
complementary products or services practice discouraged sellers to set up on-
through access fees, licensing fees, revenue line shops, whereas Taobao offered a cost-
shares, or sales of value-added products or free system that was financed solely by ad-
services to complementors. For example, vertisements.
Apple takes 30% of revenues for all apps
sold through its App Store, and Nespresso How can you find the right monetization
takes a license fee from machine makers strategy for a given business ecosystem? In
such as Krups, Breville, and De’Longhi. general, monetization should be designed
so that it does not stifle the growth of the
Transaction ecosystems offer many more ecosystem but instead encourages and in-
options for capturing value. The orchestra- centivizes participation and thus fosters
tor can charge for access, for example, with network effects. This can be achieved, for
a general access fee to the platform, an en- example, by charging for transactions rath-
hanced access fee for producers for better er than access, subsidizing the side of the
targeted messages or interactions with par- market that is less willing to participate, or
ticularly valuable users, premium access offering rebates for increased usage and re-
fees for consumers, or enhanced curation wards for inviting others to join the net-
fees for users who are willing to pay for work. A good starting point is to identify
guaranteed quality. The orchestrator can the participants with the highest willing-
also charge for usage in the form of a trans- ness to pay and charge them according to
action fee, either a fixed fee per transac- the net excess value they derive from the
tion or a percentage of the transaction ecosystem.
price. In addition, the orchestrator can
charge for supplementary products or ser- Moreover, monetization should be used to
vices (such as invoicing, payments, insur- overcome bottlenecks in the ecosystem and
ance), or it can monetize the ecosystem in- to encourage innovation by, for example,
directly through advertising revenues. subsidizing bottleneck players and offering
better terms for new products. Of course,
Whom Should You Charge? the pricing strategy of an ecosystem can
The second critical question of value cap- change over time. Many platforms initially
ture is whom to charge. Again, the orches- subsidize one or both sides of the market

Boston Consulting Group | BCG Henderson Institute 9

to overcome the chicken-or-egg problem as a balanced number of drivers and riders
during launch. However, most of them real- for a ride-hailing ecosystem like Uber).
ize that it is difficult to transition from free Identity and culture are important success
to fee and that they need to offer new, ad- factors for a business ecosystem, and it is
ditional value to justify the change. difficult to change them once they are es-
tablished. Ecosystem growth is thus strong-
ly path dependent, and the selection of
Step 5: How Can You Solve the early members and the sequence of at-
Chicken-Or-Egg Problem During tracting members can have a big impact.
Launch? You can even experience negative network
effects from attracting “bad” users, as Cha-
What does it take to achieve troulette, the random video chat platform,
critical mass? experienced with its “naked-hairy-men
Many ecosystems fail during the launch problem.”
phase because they cannot solve the chick-
en-or-egg problem of sufficient participa- What is the Minimum Viable
tion of both buyers and sellers/producers. Ecosystem?
They do not achieve the critical mass to se- An important consideration to increase the
cure network or data flywheel effects, odds of a successful launch is to start with
whereby scale begets further scale. An a minimum viable ecosystem (MVE), a term
analysis of 57 ecosystems in 11 sectors coined by Ron Adner.4 In the traditional
across geographic markets by the BCG approach to launching a new product, the
Henderson Institute found that half of the fully developed value proposition of the
investigated ecosystems never took off. product is demonstrated in a pilot with lim-
ited commercial scale before the broad roll-
When we looked deeper into the successes out of the product. By contrast, a minimum
and failures, we noticed many misunder- viable ecosystem initially focuses on a ba-
standings regarding ecosystem launch. sic value proposition (the core transaction)
First, despite the paramount importance of but demonstrates its commercial viability
network effects in many business ecosys- at scale, directly establishing a dense net-
tems, first-mover advantages are often work of partners and customers. Over time,
overestimated. It is not about being the the MVE can expand its value proposition
first in the market, but being first with a in a series of staged expansions.
complete solution. The Apple iPod was not
the first digital music player, but it was the To quickly get to critical mass and build a
first to offer a comprehensive solution by dense network, many successful ecosys-
combining the hardware product with the tems we observed initially constrained
iTunes music management software. themselves by geography. For example,
Airbnb first focused on New York, and
Second, the size of the network should be even as the company started its interna-
measured not by vanity metrics, such as tional expansion in 2011, it focused on cre-
the number of members, but by the num- ating critical mass in just a few markets.
ber of interactions or transactions, which is Similarly, OpenTable conquered one city at
how business ecosystems create value. a time, following the rule of thumb that
Most network effects are “local” (not only once 50 to 100 concentrated restaurants in
in a geographical sense), so network densi- a city subscribed, enough consumers would
ty may be a more important driver of value use the platform.
for users than network size.
On the other hand, many failed ecosystems
Third, it is not only about the quantity of expanded too quickly. For example, Better
participants but about the right partici- Place may have been able to overcome the
pants (such as the most attractive restau- chicken-or-egg problem if it had focused on
rants for an online booking platform like its two core markets, Israel and Denmark,
OpenTable) in the right proportions (such where it achieved early success. However,

Boston Consulting Group | BCG Henderson Institute 10

the company moved too quickly to estab- Transaction ecosystems have an even larg-
lish toeholds and run pilots in a wide range er number of levers at their disposal to
of new locations and ran out of money be- kick-start the platform. Sometimes they can
fore it could secure the critical level of build on the existing infrastructure or cus-
sales volumes to attract and retain part- tomer base of a linear business model, as
ners—most important, automakers. Amazon did when it opened its established
e-commerce system to external producers
Other failed ecosystems completely ignored and launched Amazon Marketplace. Or
the MVE concept and launched an offering they can piggyback on an existing transac-
that was too broad rather than focusing on tion ecosystem, like PayPal did on eBay’s
the core transaction. For example, Club online auction platform.
Nexus, an early social network created in
2001, allowed students to chat, send If this is not possible, the critical question
emails, post events, buy and sell goods, and is which side of the market to focus on ini-
post images and articles. The complexity of tially in order to build critical mass. Most
features made the platform difficult to use ecosystem orchestrators that we analyzed
and weakened the strength of its network. focused first on building supply, and they
Facebook learned from this failure and used various levers to do so. Some seeded
started with only very simple profiles and and subsidized one side of the market. For
allowed users to view only other people example, Uber initially guaranteed drivers
who went to the same school. $40 per hour as long as they kept the app
running and maintained an acceptance
Which Side of the Market Should rate of 70%. Some attracted supply by pro-
You Focus On? viding free or subsidized tools and services
In solution ecosystems, the main challeng- (Airbnb), subsidizing marquee producers to
es are typically on the complementor side: join the platform (Twitter), or creating an
convincing partners to commit to and in- initial offering by acting as a producer
vest in an unproven business opportunity. themselves (Quora, Reddit). An interesting
It helps if the orchestrator credibly demon- strategy can be to create standalone value
strates its own commitment through a for one side first. For example, OpenTable
large upfront investment in the ecosystem, started by building a suite of software tools
as Microsoft did when it entered the video for restaurants to replace their manual
game console market in committing to sell booking process, which created the techni-
the Xbox at a low price to convince game cal preconditions and a loyal base of sup-
developers that there would be demand pliers for their online booking platform.
for their products. In addition, Microsoft
subsidized some marquee developers to Supply-constrained ecosystems should not
join the ecosystem. shy away from more traditional levers.
Most successful food delivery platforms, for
The orchestrator can make it easier to join instance, started by hiring a field sales
by providing free or subsidized tools and force that simply walked into restaurants
services for complementors. Some orches- during their downtime and talked to own-
trators even sign conditional contracts with ers to convince them to join their ecosys-
complementors and/or customers obliging tem. Many ride-hailing platforms used re-
them to join the ecosystem if it gets enough ferrals to incentivize existing suppliers to
members of the other group to participate. bring new suppliers to the platform.
If this does not work, the orchestrator can
still develop or buy some of the required Some transaction ecosystems are not sup-
complements itself to kick-start the ecosys- ply-constrained and should focus on grow-
tem. For example, Apple launched the iP- ing the demand side. For example, Task-
hone with a number of applications that it Rabbit had thousands of people on the
developed in-house, including a web waitlist to provide services but had more
browser, mail, contacts, calendar, photos, trouble building demand. The company de-
videos, and iTunes. liberately constrained supply by charging a

Boston Consulting Group | BCG Henderson Institute 11

fee and processing background checks in the potential not only for supply-side econ-
order to increase the quality of the offering omies of scale but also for demand-side
and thus attract demand. economies of scale and the resulting posi-
tive feedback loops. In particular, de-
Other ecosystems follow a zigzag strategy mand-side scale effects enable many eco-
to bring on both sides of the market at systems to grow quickly and exhibit
once. For example, Alibaba worked hard on winner-takes-all or at least winner-takes-
getting Chinese suppliers and foreign buy- most characteristics (at least for some
ers on board simultaneously when it first time). However, some ecosystems have only
launched. YouTube also pushed participa- limited demand- and supply-side econo-
tion by both sides simultaneously and al- mies of scale. And many ecosystems have
ternated between strategies to get more failed because they did not solve the scal-
people to upload and more people to view. ability challenge.
The Japanese firm Recruit, which builds
ecosystems to reinvigorate mature service Demand-side economies of scale make net-
markets, deploys what it calls its Ribbon works more attractive to users as more us-
Model to alternate between building sup- ers participate in the ecosystem. They can
ply and building demand. be based on direct (same-side) or indirect
(cross-side) network effects. More tradition-
And finally, some successful platforms use al market-building instruments, such as a
context-dependent creative and even devi- strong brand, can reinforce these network
ous tricks to overcome the chicken-or-egg effects. Demand-side economies of scale
problem. Twitter achieved its breakthrough are larger for ecosystems with global busi-
by traditional push marketing with a big- ness models (travel booking platforms)
bang event at the 2007 South by Southwest than for multi-local ecosystems (food deliv-
(SXSW) tech festival. Airbnb, instead of ery platforms), where the network effects
building supply from scratch, used readily are limited to small local clusters. More-
available information on property owners over, an ecosystem may experience nega-
who wanted to rent out their properties tive network effects and declining quality
from Craigslist, a popular online classified from growing the network, for example, if
website. And Uber launched Operation it becomes increasingly difficult to find the
SLOG (Supplying Long-term Operations best match in a growing transaction ecosys-
Growth) to aggressively attract drivers from tem. Such negative network effects can be
rival ride-hailing service Lyft. limited through effective (and scalable) cu-
ration using data, algorithms, and social
We conclude that successfully launching a feedback mechanisms.
business ecosystem is a big challenge that
requires more than a strong initial design. Supply-side economies of scale can be based
It takes persistence, deep pockets, and on falling fixed or variable costs. They are
sometimes the willingness to follow unusu- particularly strong in many digital ecosys-
al and creative approaches that may not be tems, which are frequently characterized
financially sustainable, in order to kick- by asset-light business models (Airbnb
start the ecosystem. However, if the ecosys- achieved a dominant position in the hospi-
tem is to be viable in the long run, it also tality market without owning a single ho-
needs to be designed for evolvability. tel), low-to-zero marginal cost (no signifi-
cant effort of serving an additional
customer on the Amazon Marketplace),
Step 6: How Can You Ensure and increasing returns on data (more effec-
Evolvability And the Long-Term tive matching of riders and drivers on a
Viability of Your Ecosystem? growing ride-hailing platform). Supply-side
scale effects can be limited by sticky costs,
How Can You Scale the Ecosystem? for example, if competition between eco-
In contrast to most traditional business systems requires ongoing high marketing
models, many business ecosystems have and recruiting investments (food delivery

Boston Consulting Group | BCG Henderson Institute 12

platforms) or if a fast rate of technological but limited supply-side scale effects. We
innovation requires ongoing high research call them value traps. Ride-hailing plat-
and development expenses (ride-hailing). forms may be an example. The model
Moreover, the rising cost of complexity and clearly has substantial positive indirect net-
quality control may counterbalance posi- work effects that support explosive growth,
tive scale effects as the network grows. but it lacks substantial scale benefits on
the supply side, mainly because of the high
We suggest a simple matrix to analyze the recruiting and retention cost for drivers.
scalability position of your ecosystem. (See Such businesses can struggle to become
Exhibit 3.) sustainable.

Airbnb is an example of an ecosystem with And then there are examples of ecosystem
both substantial demand-side economies of plays that have neither substantial supply-
scale (indirect network effects) as well as nor demand-side economies of scale. We
supply-side economies of scale (from call them dead ends. An example is the orig-
spreading the high fixed-cost for technolo- inal Yahoo internet portal and search en-
gy and marketing). We characterize this gine, which started as an employee-edited
model as a flywheel, with winner-takes-all- hierarchical database that classified web-
or-most characteristics. pages using a tree structure of categories.
This model worked well for some time, but
Some ecosystems have supply-side econo- as the internet grew exponentially, it be-
mies of scale but only limited demand-side came apparent that it was not scalable, and
economies of scale, such as additive manu- Yahoo was overtaken by Google with its au-
facturing and many other solution ecosys- tomatic and easily scaling page-rank algo-
tems with small network effects. They need rithm.
to follow a path of patience when it comes
to growth, but they also have a good It is important to understand the scalabili-
chance of achieving a profitable and de- ty position of your emerging ecosystem
fendable position. and to adapt your ecosystem design and
ecosystem strategy accordingly. However,
More critical are ecosystem models that scalability is only the first step toward
have high demand-side economies of scale long-term viability. To thrive in the long

Exhibit 3 | How Scalable Is Your Ecosystem?

High
Demand-side economies of scale

VALUE TRAP FLYWHEEL

PATH OF
DEAD END
PATIENCE
Low

Low High
Supply-side economies of scale

Source: BCG Henderson Institute.

Boston Consulting Group | BCG Henderson Institute 13

run, your ecosystem also needs to be ers who were satisfied with the service of a
defendable. cleaner did not return to the platform but
hired the person directly. Homejoy closed
How Can You Defend the down in 2015.
Ecosystem?
Ecosystems have some built-in defensibility Third, differentiation and attack from niches
advantages, and many exhibit natural win- happens when a subset of users has dis-
ner-takes-all-or-most characteristics. Once tinctive needs or tastes that can support a
they have achieved a dominant market po- separate ecosystem and take away market
sition, strong barriers to entry result from share from the dominant player. For exam-
the network effects and scale advantages ple, Upwork, the leading marketplace for
on costs and data mentioned above. More- freelance labor, found it difficult to estab-
over, ecosystems compete at the system, lish a defendable dominant position (and
not at the product, level, which gives them earn a decent return) because of market
a deeper type of competitive advantage fragmentation and competition from hun-
that is more difficult to copy and attack dreds of niche players that focus on specif-
than just a superior product or service. ic industries, job types, or locations.

However, our analysis of successful and And finally, ecosystem carryover happens
failed ecosystems showed that many eco- when a successful business ecosystem ex-
systems found it easier to achieve scale pands into a neighboring domain. It is an
than to sustain it. Defending a strong posi- important route for ecosystem growth and
tion as an ecosystem is challenging because expansion, as we will discuss in the next
an attack can target either the demand or section, but also a significant threat for es-
the supply side of the market. We identi- tablished ecosystems. A special case of eco-
fied four main mechanisms of attack that system carryover is nested ecosystems. For
ecosystems need to be aware of. example, we could imagine that ride-hail-
ing platforms at some point may come un-
First, multihoming happens when suppliers der pressure from broader mobili-
or consumers participate in multiple com- ty-as-a-service ecosystems that include
peting ecosystems at the same time, or eas- multimodal transport solutions, which may
ily switch between ecosystems. Restaurants in turn be attacked by even broader smart-
may find it attractive to offer their dishes city ecosystems.
on multiple food-delivery platforms, for in-
stance, and consumers use different ho- Digital technologies, while offering new
tel-booking platforms to chase the best of- ways of exploiting network effects and sup-
fering. Multihoming is a particular risk for ply-side economies of scale, also make it
an ecosystem if switching costs are low. For more difficult to defend an established po-
example, because credit cards tend to have sition. Digital business models have much
low annual fees, many people carry multi- lower entry barriers than traditional brick-
ple cards in their wallet. By contrast, only and-mortar businesses. It is so easy to cre-
few people can afford to carry both an An- ate a digital platform today that you do not
droid and Apple phone, so they tend to even need to program your own software
choose one model and stay with it for at but can build it from components available
least a couple of years. on cloud-services platforms. Digital net-
work effects as a barrier to entry are much
Second, disintermediation happens when weaker than the physical network effects
partners from two sides of a transaction of a railway or telephone network. More-
ecosystem bypass the matching platform over, they can quickly be reversed once a
and connect directly. For example, Home- network starts losing users and gets into a
joy, an online platform that connected cus- downward spiral, as once-dominant plat-
tomers with home service providers, in- forms like Second Life and BlackBerry have
cluding house cleaners and handymen, painfully experienced. And finally, the high
suffered from disintermediation as custom- rate of innovation and technological dis-

Boston Consulting Group | BCG Henderson Institute 14

ruption in this field means that established benefit from substantial supply-side econo-
ecosystems will always be challenged by mies of scale (low marginal cost of selling
new players with a better concept and a an existing game), and experience limited
more exciting offering. Think of how Mys- threat from niche specialization. However,
pace killed Friendster, only to be subse- the industry suffers from multihoming of
quently killed by Facebook. game developers, who have high incentives
to work for multiple console producers, as
If you want to design your business ecosys- well as of players, who are further encour-
tem for evolvability and long-term viability, aged by subsidized console prices. As a re-
you need to build in some characteristics sult, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony have
that make it easier to defend. How can you formed a rather stable oligopoly for an ex-
evaluate how well your ecosystem is pre- tended period of time, but market shares
pared? Here are four essential questions: have varied from console generation to
generation, depending on the newly intro-
•• How strong are network effects in your duced games and hardware features.
ecosystem?
What can you do as an orchestrator to im-
•• To what extent can your ecosystem prove the defensibility of your ecosystem?
benefit from supply-side economies of Of course, you can try to increase barriers
scale? to entry. For example, you can reduce the
incentive to multihome by building propri-
•• How high are multihoming and switch- etary standards that suppliers must follow
ing costs on the demand and supply or by creating loyalty programs for users.
side? You can also implement a rather strict gov-
ernance that requires suppliers to commit
•• To what extent is your ecosystem exclusively to your ecosystem. However,
protected from specialized niche this will also limit their incentive to join
competition? your ecosystem in the first place.

The application of the four defensibility The most effective defense, however, is to
tests to ride-hailing platforms such as Uber, ensure that you offer the best available
Lyft, and Didi uncovers the fundamental product or platform and the best overall
challenges of their business models. On the ecosystem solution. Having only a superior
positive side, there is only limited threat product or platform is no longer sufficient
from niche specialization in ride-hailing, in an ecosystem world, where competition
and the platforms can clearly benefit from happens at the system level. In many ways,
substantial indirect network effects. How- the BlackBerry was superior to the iP-
ever, these effects are only local and diffi- hone—in terms of data security, keypad,
cult to transfer to new cities. More impor- and battery life—but Apple offered the
tantly, ride-hailing suffers from far-better overall solution with its ecosys-
multihoming and low switching costs for tem of app developers.
riders, who have a high incentive to use
multiple ride-hailing services, as well as At the same time, you must not neglect
drivers, who can easily switch between your core product. In 2004, Microsoft’s In-
platforms or even serve multiple platforms ternet Explorer captured close to 95% mar-
at the same time. As indicated above, the ket share and was widely considered to
resulting high recruiting and retention have won the browser war. However, with
costs for drivers lead to limited supply-side no serious competitor left, Microsoft under-
economies of scale, further reducing barri- invested in the further development of the
ers to entry. browser and its underlying ecosystem. Infe-
rior product execution and product innova-
By contrast, video games score better in tion from 2004 to 2015 allowed Firefox and
the defensibility test. They exhibit moder- Chrome to enter and eventually dominate
ate, but global, indirect network effects, the market.

Boston Consulting Group | BCG Henderson Institute 15

In the end, the only way to defend your such as food delivery, e-bikes and scooters,
leading position as an ecosystem is to be and courier services (which shut down
the technology and innovation leader in in 2018). And finally, ecosystem carryover is
your industry, to encourage all partners in a strategy that leverages the success of
the ecosystem to relentlessly innovate, and one ecosystem to create advantage in con-
to continuously adapt and reinvent your structing a new one. For example, Apple
ecosystem, before others do. used its strong position in the music player
ecosystem to conquer the smartphone
How Can You Expand the ecosystem by positioning the iPhone as
Ecosystem? the next-generation iPod. In this way, the
The exact route of expansion of a business iPhone started with a built-in, loyal custom-
ecosystem cannot and should not be er base, which gave Apple a decisive com-
planned in advance. A key benefit of eco- petitive advantage in this emerging
systems is their responsiveness to changing market.
consumer needs and technological oppor-
tunities. It is thus important for an ecosys- As these examples indicate, many different
tem orchestrator to be open to the creative assets can serve as a basis for ecosystem
potential of consumers and complemen- expansion. It could be existing relation-
tors, and to build flexibility and adaptabili- ships to customers and/or complementors
ty into the model. that can be transferred to new applications,
as in the case of the iPhone. It could be
An ideal ecosystem architecture uses a idle capacity, as in the case of Amazon,
modular setup with clearly defined inter- which used server capacity from its retail
faces, such as APIs in digital ecosystems. operations as a starting point for building
They define how ecosystem members con- Amazon Web Services. It could be technol-
nect to the overall system and should pro- ogy, as in the case of Alphabet, which used
vide the element of stability of the ecosys- its Google navigation technology to build
tem. When complementors can rely on the the Waymo ecosystem for self-driving vehi-
stability of interfaces, they can flexibly in- cles. And it could be data, as in the case of
novate and add new functionalities to the Alibaba, which used information from
system. Even major technological changes transactions on its Taobao marketplace to
in the core product or platform can be easi- build the Ant Financial ecosystem. Whatev-
ly accommodated, as long as the interfaces er the critical assets for future expansion
remain stable. In this way, Microsoft man- will be, ecosystem orchestrators need to en-
aged to defend Windows as the dominating sure in their ecosystem design that they
PC operating system over three decades, in control them.
spite of substantially changing technologies
and customer preferences. How Can You Protect Against
Backlash?
Three pathways for expansion should be A number of large platform-based ecosys-
considered in ecosystem design. First, ex- tems have recently experienced a substan-
pansion can happen by adding new products tial backlash from consumers and regula-
or services to an existing ecosystem. For ex- tors. For example, marketplaces such as
ample, LinkedIn started as a social net- Amazon and eBay were criticized for not
work, allowing users to connect with other collecting sales taxes to gain a competitive
professionals through simple profiles. Over advantage. Uber and Airbnb were accused
time, it added further services, such as a of escaping regulation in the transportation
marketplace for online recruiting, ad- and hospitality sector in order to avoid
vanced messaging features, and a content costly requirements for safety, insurance,
publishing platform. Second, an existing hygiene, and workers’ rights that apply to
ecosystem can be used to expand into adja- taxis and hotels. And Facebook was harshly
cent markets. For example, Uber started as a criticized for its data privacy policies and
ride-hailing service and successively ex- for false and misleading stories disseminat-
panded into other mobility-related services, ed on the platform.

Boston Consulting Group | BCG Henderson Institute 16

It is true that many ecosystem models have
successfully exploited missing regulation
for new technologies or gaps in existing
D esigning a business ecosystem is a
major undertaking. The six steps and
underlying interdependent design choices
regulation. However, as ecosystems begin we present here can help. A business
to dominate larger parts of our economy, ecosystem that is well-designed in this way
social and regulatory scrutiny will increase, has the potential to create entire new
and members of an ecosystem must accept, industries or substantially shape and
anticipate, and address their growing re- transform existing industries.
sponsibility. To this end, it is important to
design your ecosystem not only for legal At the same time, it is important to accept
compliance but also for long-term social ac- that business ecosystems cannot be entire-
ceptance, and to make it robust in the face ly planned and designed—they also
of shifts in public values and perceptions. emerge. Ecosystem design must ensure that
For example, the high energy intensity of the basics are in place and strategic blun-
many digital business models has recently ders are avoided, but it must also leave
been increasingly criticized, and designing room for creativity, serendipitous discover-
an ecosystem with a favorable climate foot- ies, and emerging customer needs. Ecosys-
print may soon become an important com- tems that are successful in the long run
petitive advantage. need to be adaptable and be ready to mod-
ify their designs in anticipation of shifts in
There are also increasing concerns that markets, technologies, regulations, and
dominant ecosystems may become too big public sentiment. They must also be ready
to control and could abuse their market to embrace the serendipity of unintended
power. Existing antitrust legislation in most and unforeseen opportunities.
countries is not well suited to regulate busi-
ness ecosystems. To avoid a regulatory
backlash, ecosystem orchestrators should
anticipate such concerns, continuously Notes
challenge their ecosystem design, and work 1. D.P. Hannah and K.M. Eisenhardt, “How firms
navigate cooperation and competition in nascent
with regulators to ensure broad social ac- ecosystems,” Strategic Management Journal, December
ceptance. More important, they should pre- 2018.
empt regulation by self-regulating and not 2. Ron Adner, The Wide Lens, Penguin Group, 2012
abusing their central role in the ecosystem 3. K. Järvi et al., “Organization of knowledge
ecosystems: Prefigurative and partial forms,”
and their ecosystem’s role in the economy. Research Policy, October 2018.
In the long run, a business ecosystem will 4. Ron Adner, The Wide Lens, Penguin Group, 2012.
prosper only if it continues to create tangi-
ble value for its customers and ensures fair
value distribution among all contributors
to the ecosystem.

About the Authors

Ulrich Pidun is a partner and director in the Frankfurt office of Boston Consulting Group. He is a core
member of the Corporate Finance & Strategy practice, a global expert on corporate strategy, and a Fellow
at the BCG Henderson Institute. You may contact him by email at pidun.ulrich@bcg.com.

Martin Reeves is a managing director and senior partner in BCG’s San Francisco office and the chair-
man of the BCG Henderson Institute. You may follow him on Twitter @martinKReeves and contact him by
email at reeves.martin@bcg.com.

Maximilian Schüssler was a project leader in BCG’s Munich office and an ambassador at the BCG Hen-
derson Institute.

Boston Consulting Group | BCG Henderson Institute 17

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