Business Ecosystems: A four-book library

March 22nd, 2006

A comprehensive overview of business ecosystems as an approach to business strategy is provided by the following books.  These books combine detailed case studies with systematic theorizing, in order to provide a strong foundation to strategy making as well as (increasingly) government policy-making as it applies to innovation.


Carliss Baldwin and Kim Clark are professors at the Harvard Business School (Carliss is a premier thinker on product architectures and the economics of product and process systems, and Kim a reknown expert on innovation in large-scale manufacturing processes, and a former dean of the school), Werner Callebaut is with the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, Vienna, and Diego Rasskin-Gutman is at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, San Diego).  Marco Iansiti is a senior professor at the Harvard Business School (Marco is a leader of studies of strategy and innovation at the school). 















by Carliss Y. Baldwin and Kim Clark
by Werner Callebaut and Diego Rasskin-Gutman 
by Marco Iansiti and Roy Levien

by James F. Moore

Posted by jimmoore
Filed in Economics and cybenetics
Comments off

Consilience, Business Ecosystems, Co-evolutionary Modularity, and Ecological Computing

March 22nd, 2006

Introduction: Systems evolving in business, products and processes, and infomation systems and services

 

The sustance of this post:

 

This post is intended to bring together some interesting resources, on four related topics:  consilience and systems thinking, business ecosystems, co-evolutionary modularity, and ecological computing.

 

The systems perspective continues to revolutionize academic fields from mathematics and computer science, to biology and medicine, to law, social policy and international relations. I reference Edward Wilson’s book, Consilience, which suggests why the perspective is so important.

 

The systems perspective has made a quiet but profound change in business strategy making over the past decade, having become the dominant paradigm for most large-scale businesses, and increasingly used by small businesses as well.

 

The acceleration of product and service innovation, and the sourcing of elements of products and services from an increasing web of suppliers, has made the co-evolution of modules a center of competitive activity.  This sort of competition–or rather coopetiion–started during the American revolution with the manufacture of rifles with interchangeable parts, has been profoundly important in the computer industry, and now permeates every form of business.  In a reference that I site below, Baldwin and Clark of Harvard Business School introduce a general theory of modularity that brings this competition to a new level of self-awareness.

 

Perhaps most interesting, in the information and communication technology sphere,  the emerging ecosystems of fast-evolving, interdependent web services are a dramatic expression of systems effects that are vastly expanding participation and innovation across the web.

 

The process of this post:

 

This post is intended to be a kind of play-within-a-play.  The construction of the post uses screen-scraping of HTML from Amazon.com pages, to make a rough-and-ready pull-based integration of data from multiple web services on one page–just in blog software.

 

The result, I believe, is a useful reference page–one I will point friends and colleagues to–that I constructed in less than a morning, and now stands as a permanent resource on the web–available to be ”pulled” searched and sorted, clustered and displayed by anyone on the world who is connected to the web. 

 

With all of our justified excitement about AJAX, it is nice to remember that the integration of very very useful data from multiple servers and services can be hacked together with PERL and, even more accessible, with HTML in blog software, as here.  Oh yea, another benefit that comes from doing this in HTML is that Google and Yahoo index the page…

 

This process is how the semantic ecology of today’s internet expands, differentiates, and integrates..A simple feature like Amazon’s, added to already-indexed content, instantly doubles, triples or more the semantic mass of the web–the biomass equivalent in semantic space–and does so in an organized, clustered-hierarchy manner.  This is an almost perfect analogue of development in biological ecosystems.

 

1.  Consilience and Systems Thinking

 

There are many ways to enter the world of systems thinking.  Authors write variously of “consilience” and “complex adaptive systems.”  The following comprehensive introduction, by Edward Wilson of Harvard, is a favorite of mine

 

Consilience : The Unity of Knowledge (Hardcover)
by Edward O. Wilson “I REMEMBER very well the time I was captured by the dream of unified learning…” (more)
Explore: Citations | Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats | SIPs | CAPs
Browse: Front Cover | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!

 

 

2.  Business Ecosystems

 

Strategy-making by focusing on business ecosystems is the dominant paradigm in high technology businesses, as well as in other businesses that have been found to favor networked systems, ranging from retail to transportation. The following were written as foundation sources and texts for the approach.

 

 

The Death of Competition: Leadership and Strategy in the Age of Business Ecosystems (Hardcover)
by James F. Moore “Circling the big island of Hawaii in a small plane affords one of the most spectacular visual experiences imagin…” (more)
Explore: Citations | Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats | SIPs | CAPs
Browse: Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!

 

The Keystone Advantage: What the New Dynamics of Business Ecosystems Mean for Strategy, Innovation, and Sustainability (Hardcover)
by Marco Iansiti, Roy Levien “Strategy is becoming, to an increasing extent, the art of managing assets that one does not own…” (more)
Explore: Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats | SIPs | CAPs
Browse: Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!

 

3.  Co-evolutionary Modularity

 

If one thinks about businesses from the standpoint of products and processes, one rapidly comes up with modularity as an entry point into strategy-making and business ecosystems.  The first of these books is highly theoretical, and is intended to introduce biological thinking about modules.  The second of these books, by two leading thinkers at Harvard Business School, analyses modulary and co-evolution in products and processes.

 

 


Modularity : Understanding the Development and Evolution of Natural Complex Systems (Vienna Series in Theoretical Biology) (Hardcover)
by Werner Callebaut (Editor), Diego Rasskin-Gutman (Editor)

 

Editorial Reviews

The contributors debate and compare the uses of modularity, discussing the different disciplinary contexts of “modular thinking” in general (including hierarchical organization, near-decomposability, quasi-independence, and recursion) or of more specialized concepts (including character complex, gene family, encapsulation, and mosaic evolution); what modules are, why and how they develop and evolve, and the implication for the research agenda in the disciplines involved; and how to bring about useful cross-disciplinary knowledge transfer on the topic. The book includes a foreword by the late Herbert A. Simon addressing the role of near-decomposability in understanding complex systems.

About the Author
Werner Callebaut is Scientific Manager of the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, Vienna, and Professor of Philosophy at Limburg University, Belgium. Diego Rasskin-Gutman is Research Associate at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and Honorary Professor in the Department of Biology, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain.
 

Customers who bought this also bought


 





 

Design Rules, Vol. 1: The Power of Modularity (Hardcover)
by Carliss Y. Baldwin, Kim B. Clark
Explore: Citations
Browse: Front Cover | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover

 

Using the computer industry as an example, Carliss Y. Baldwin and Kim B. Clark develop a powerful theory of design and industrial evolution. They argue that the industry has experienced previously unimaginable levels of innovation and growth because it embraced the concept of modularity, building complex products from smaller subsystems that can be designed independently yet function together as a whole.

 

Managing in the Modular Age: Architectures, Networks, and Organizations (Paperback)
by Raghu Garud (Editor), Arun Kumaraswamy (Editor), Richard N. Langlois (Editor) “A number of proposals have been advanced in recent years for the development of “general systems theory” that, abstracting from properties peculiar to physical, biological,…” (more)
Explore: Citations | Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats | SIPs | CAPs
Browse: Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!




4.  Ecological Computing


The following pieces explore ecological thinking in regard to computing in large-scale networks.  This is the information systems counterpart to consilience, business ecosystems, and modular product and process architectures.


 



H.Zhuge and X.Shi of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.

 

Cultural and Ecological Computing aims at creating new computing model inspired from culture and natural ecology.


[1] H.Zhuge and X.Shi, Toward the Eco-Grid: A Harmoniously Evolved Interconnection Environment, Communications of the ACM, 47 (9) (2004)79-83 (Review by Frank Land, in ACM Computing Review).


[2] H.Zhuge, Exploring an Epidemic in an E-Science Environment, Communications of the ACM, September, 2005.


[3] H.Zhuge and X.Shi, Fighting Epistemology in Knowledge and Information Age, IEEE Computer, 36 (10) (2003) 114-116.


[4] H.Zhuge, Soft-Device Inheritance in the Knowledge Grid, Keynote at AIS-ADM 2005, St. Petersburg, Russia, June 6-8, 2005. Proceedings: Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol.3505, pp.62-78.


From Push to Pull: Emerging Models for Mobilizing Resources


John Seeley-Brown and John Hagel


[The authors focus on pull-basd systems, which are a fundamental aspect of the growth of business ecosystems and large-scale ecological systems.  This is part of a more general philosophy of noting the increasing power of “the edge” in societies, economies, and technology architectures.  In addition, John Seeley-Brown is one of the first users of the term “ecological computing”–used in the first instance to discuss the linking together of large networks of environmental sensors.]


 


 


 


 

Posted by jimmoore
Filed in Economics and cybenetics
Comments off

More on the meta data that Amazon.com makes available for books

March 22nd, 2006

Check out the data on my 1996 book on business ecosystems, available instantly now on Amazon.com.  This is really an author’s dream..almost better than a website!


The Death of Competition: Leadership and Strategy in the Age of Business Ecosystems (Hardcover)
by James F. Moore “Circling the big island of Hawaii in a small plane affords one of the most spectacular visual experiences imagin…” (more)
Explore: Citations | Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats | SIPs | CAPs
Browse: Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!

Posted by jimmoore
Filed in Economics and cybenetics
Comments off

User-accessable meta data creeping in everywhere

March 22nd, 2006

This little feature, available with Amazon.com’s book listings, heralds a quiet revolution:


Explore: Concordance | Text Stats | SIPs | CAPs
Browse: Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!


If you don’t have this for your content..look out..


I note how quickly meta-data and tags are being exposed in most e-commerce sites…


Basically each html page is displaying semantically-rich data about its content.


See Amazon’s “Concordance”–their nice word for tag cloud-type display of the content of a book..


Also see Amazon’s SIP and CAPs, and text stats..


Note that these forms of semantic analysis are all machine generated.


In addition, note that the profiles of any given work–the semantic profiles of any given work–can now be referenced against any other.


Do you know what is happening, Mr. Jones?  Among other things Amazon is out-doing Google in terms of relevant, open meta-analysis of book content–and Amazon has a straightforward business model for their service–and a straightforward ways to compensate publishers and thus authors…


Earth in Mind : On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect, 10th Anniversary Edition. With a new introduction and essay by the author (Paperback)
by David W. Orr “IF TODAY is a typical day on planet earth, we will lose 116 square miles of rain forest, or about an acre a second…” (more)
Explore: Concordance | Text Stats | SIPs | CAPs
Browse: Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!

Posted by jimmoore
Filed in Economics and cybenetics
Comments off