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California Management Review
California Management Review is a premier academic management journal published at UC Berkeley
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Article Information
Ecosystem Advantage: How to Successfully Harness the Power of Partners
Williamson, Peter James, and Arnoud De Meyer
55
/
1
(
Fall
2012
):
24
-
46
Changes in the global environment are generating opportunities for companies to build advantage by creating loosely coupled networks or ecosystems. Ecosystems are larger, more diverse, and more fluid than a traditional set of bilateral partnerships or complementors. By leveraging ecosystems, companies can deliver complex solutions while maintaining corporate focus. This article describes six keys to unlock ecosystem advantage: pinpointing where value is created, defining an architecture of differentiated partner roles, stimulating complementary partner investments, reducing the transaction costs, facilitating joint learning across the network, and engineering effective ways to capture profit.