For years, organizations have been run using a traditional linear value chain model. The role in the value chain would typically determine the potential revenues and regulate the organization’s activities. Yet organizations no longer succeed today by limiting themselves to thinking in a linear way. Organizations’ interactions with partners and customers are iterative. Recent paradigm shifts (e.g. product-to-service value proposition, digital transformation, Big Data, knowledge economy, business ecosystem) forced us to question a number of traditional business models across industries. What are the next breakthrough business solutions for a post-Friedman world where a firm’s bottom line is not the only indicator of success?
In this context, ESSEC Business School and Mars Catalyst (internal think tank of Mars Inc.) have embarked upon a pioneering, multi-year research partnership to explore business model innovation in the knowledge economy, with a specific focus on the transformation of linear value chain to ecosystem business model. If the Fourth Industrial Revolution is all about capturing complexity and grand scale, we need business models and methodologies for business that are practical enough to describe existing ecosystems and to also design new ones.