Developing a business ecosystem through design-thinking strategy

Abstract

The paper examines the possibilities to apply design thinking to building an effective ecosystem model of business. We aim to consider three main areas of a company’s ecosystem business model: consumers, partners and products/services. We believe that prototyping of this business model should be carried out in these areas. We analyze the genesis of design thinking concept and consider the features of forming the ecosystem business model based on design thinking. We study the experience in forming foreign and Russian ecosystem business models, as well as the factors of its efficiency. The approaches used by the analyzed ecosystem companies is, in our opinion, a key factor of successful business in today’s conditions, characterized by increasing digitization and switching behavioral patterns of consumers from offline to online trading environment. This change in consumer behaviour has been observed for several years, but an accelerated the transition to online ecosystems has been particularly impressive during the COVID-19 pandemic and post-pandemic period. The authors argue that the use of design thinking, its methodological and instrumental approaches will allow to create integrated client-oriented proposals, as well as to form new consumer values, especially at early stages of developing ecosystem business models. The authors analyze the success in applying ecosystem business models with the help of the RUSECO index weighted by market capitalization of domestic corporations, which demonstrated stable upward dynamics up to 2022. The data provided by the authors on market capitalization of foreign ecosystem companies also support the assumption that such an approach to the creation of effective business models is advisable.