Accelerating Business Transformation Through Ecosystems

Rupinder Pal Singh
4 min readMay 6, 2021

The inability to respond to the evolving market conditions and user expectations turned out to be a daunting task, especially during these unprecedented times. Operating businesses with resiliency and agility turned out to be a smart move in 2020. And since the COVID-19 crisis, competitive weaknesses along with competitive strengths have been exposed in the market at the global level. The pandemic made a surge in sales of some businesses that launched remarkable products and services at the perfect timing, while other business verticals were hit adversely and are undergoing the worst. What’s really noteworthy is bringing the right products at the right time in the market turned out to be a smart move that lent a helping hand to the citizens while businesses experienced a great surge in sales.

Backed by meticulous planning and far-sighted approval structures, businesses did succeed in the swift production of products in the first place and assisted the individuals and users during these critical times. But, to ensure the delivery of products at a much faster pace than before to meet the current needs of the users at this moment, businesses adopted a different yet nimble approach- practicing a fresh operating model which ensured streamlined approvals, minimized internal bureaucracy, and built perpetual preparedness. Sticking to this approach ensured a super-fast product delivery than ever before and meeting the end customers’ bulk demands.

To reach this level of preparedness throughout this crisis comprised few major things- understanding and awareness of the consumers, a futuristic approach, localized decision-making and ecosystems that enabled businesses to cater to the rapid surge in the demand-driven landscape.

In recent times, businesses have realized that they lacked confidence and doubted if they had sufficient resources, skills, and expertise to respond to the changing market conditions and user habits. Organizations realized their inability to meet customer’s demands and put business performance at risk since they failed to keep pace with disruption.

Current operating models turn out to be extremely slow and too big to respond to the cataclysmic market and evolving changes. This indicates a rapid change and updation in the businesses operating model to adapt to the changes smartly. However, currently undergoing a global catastrophe, this need has become a dire necessity for businesses where agility and resilient operating models act as a pathway for rapid growth and innovation and assist businesses to gain a competitive edge.

Delivering strategic imperatives with ecosystems

The majority of the executives are positive about maximizing their reliability on external partners to ensure delivery on their strategic imperatives. All these things highlight the importance of ecosystems in today’s environment. Ecosystems hold the potential of taking operating models of businesses to a whole new level and enable enterprises to achieve their long-term goals smartly.

Strengthen resiliency

Ecosystem partners even hold power to strengthen resilience in numerous ways. Accessing ecosystems will allow businesses to reduce over-reliance on core capabilities and staggered the pace of many during the initial stage of COVID-19. Despite the adverse business breakdowns, ecosystem partners assisted countless businesses with the resiliency to grow during the pandemic. Experiencing great business growth and seeking new business opportunities is what ecosystem partners are capable of during and beyond these tough times.

Rapid innovation

The entire C-suite executives prefer developing an ecosystem business model important for their organization while they steer the disruption that occurred due to COVID-19 and explored viable avenues for futuristic growth. With this, businesses globally realize the power of ecosystems for driving business growth and innovation, which becomes recognized in recent times. Moreover, the majority of future-ready enterprises who acquired a rapid elevation in profitability and efficiency in the market plan to scale their ecosystems in recent times to strengthen their growth strategies. It will enable businesses to leverage ecosystem partners and drive innovation beyond their limits of legacy strengths.

Addressing bureaucracy

Delayed decision-making acts as a hindrance in the path of resilience and agility. Relying on ecosystem partners for addressing these issues allows enterprises to adapt at a greater pace to the evolving user and market requirements. This, on the whole, is termed as an ecosystem advantage that holds endless benefits for the businesses during and beyond these unprecedented times. Leveraging reliable ecosystem partners ensures improved market responsiveness while analyzing the abilities, consumers, ideas, and innovation required to respond to evolving consumer expectations, preferences, market trends, regulatory changes, and competitive threats.

In those scenarios, organizations are using their ecosystems to rapidly access fresh routes to consumers and gain a competitive edge in the market. Businesses that didn’t have a noticeable presence in the market earlier are now experiencing a high volume of customers and skyrocketing business sales in recent times while banking on ecosystem partners.

Enterprises at the global level have seen the worst during the pandemic and many of them relied on partners throughout their ecosystem to tackle the business challenges smartly. Businesses that are reaping the benefits out of ecosystem partners have a long way to go tackling the unexpected challenges smartly and rapidly. However, there are businesses struggling and having a tough time getting back on track after this major hit. These uncertain times have brought new ways of business operations where businesses have realized how ecosystem partners have opened the doors for ample business opportunities. Despite the pandemic and worst times for businesses, enterprises have unlocked the true potential of ecosystems lately and reaped the maximum out of it.

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Rupinder Pal Singh

As the CEO of Seasia Group of Companies, I have more than two decades of exposure in crafting digital experiences for all sorts of business verticals.