Business Ecosystems and public goods
Jan 11th, 2006 by jimmoore
As some of you know, the United States government has chartered a commission
to modernize and reform antitrust and competition policy. This is
one of a number of efforts to improve how governments around the world
protect consumers and provide fair and pro-innovation rules for
competition.
Of particular interest is understanding the business
ecosystem organizational form, which interpenetrates and shapes
co-evolution among markets and companies. This form of
organization creates powerful public goods, including technical
standards, coopetition among companies, and an industry structure that
can be wildly participatory, open and global. Consider the open source
movement, and open source projects.
This past spring I was
asked by the American Antitrust Institute to keynote the >AAI Invitational Roundtable on Complexity, Networks and the
Modernization of Antitrust along with Marco Iansiti of Harvard Business School. We both have written extensively on business ecosystems, including books (Moore, Iansiti) and Harvard Business Review articles (Moore).
The Antitrust Bulletin (RSS feed of recent article titles) is preparing a special issue based on the
contributions of invited members of the antitrust and competition
policy community, as well as experts on strategy and competition.
My paper has been accepted and is being cast in galleys and line
edited. A limited circulation draft of my paper is available
here, in pdf format. This version has a few typos, but otherwise it will change little between now and the final version.
Please send comments. The paper includes an abbreviated overview of the
history of the invention of the business ecosystems organizational
form. It begins with the IBM/360–the first modular computer
system, which in turn spawned the first open, co-evolving industry
cluster. It continues through to the Web 2.0 ecosystem. If
you were or are a participant in any of these phases of the history of
the form, especially early history, it would be nice to be in touch. I
will be doing interviews for a book project to follow the
article. Thanks much! Best, Jim