Collaborative design of your business ecosystemOur vision is that to implement a new business idea, you need an ecosystem of partners, and that to organize this ecosystem, you need an ecosystem-wide business model. Let's unpack this.First, you need an ecosystem.To implement a business idea, you need an ecosystem of suppliers, partners, infrastructure providers, platforms, complementors, and customers. You need to work with regulators to explore opportunities and constraints. And you need to understand how your current and future competitors navigate this ecosystem.Second, you need a business model of that ecosystem. Too often, we have seen that the effort to set up an ecosystem leads to disagreement, misunderstanding and disappointment among players. This can be resolved by creating a business model that covers the entire ecosystem. The model describes what value is created for customers, clarifies who participates in creating it, how they collaborate to deliver value to the customer, and how they capture revenue from this. This shared business model creates a common language and aligns stakeholder goals.Third, you need to agree on this business model. A core problem in ecosystem design is that the costs and benefits are distributed unevenly across participants. Usually, value is enjoyed at a different place than where costs are incurred. Our vision is that value network design is a collaborative activity in which all players agree on the configuration of the network and on the value transfers that take place, and each player understands that they can capture sufficient revenue from this collaboration.

I have been reponsible for the programme on Business Information Technology and have supervised hundreds of M.Sc students in applied projects in industry. I also have supervised over thirty PhD students in business ecosystems,. business modeling, requirements engineering, and cyberrisk assessment. My passion is to make complex problems simple.