Ecosystems as a Modern Tool for Business Growth

Abstract

The paper describes opportunities and problems of the ecosystem approach to management of enterprises based on the analysis of the performance of Russian ecosystems. It is shown that business ecosystems, integrating companies and creating value propositions for customers on the one window principle, modify the mechanisms of partnership and competition and become an innovative way for the joint development of participants in a changing space of opportunities based on complementary innovations and distributed creativity. The authors characterize differences between ecosystems as new organizational forms of business and traditional forms of cooperation revealing the advantages of the ecosystem approach as well as barriers to its use. The key characteristics of the business ecosystem helped classify potential participants of the ecosystem in accordance with their functional roles as well as strategic alternatives for their development. The authors outlined contours of the multidimensional space of ecosystem participants strategic choices and defined possible ways of the evolution of ecosystems, thus making a certain contribution to the development of the strategic management theory in relation to ecosystem approach.