A purpose-aligned approach to building business ecosystems

Embedding design thinking, methods, and tools from the earliest stages of ecosystem development helps companies craft integrated offerings that delight customers, combat emerging threats, and unearth new sources of value. Organizations that approach ecosystems with a strong design mindset typically have more success shaping cohesive user experiences, ensuring the final products and services feel like a seamless solution rather than a collection of disconnected offerings.

Business leaders across the globe have been turning to the ecosystem business model to boost top-line growth by reinforcing their core offerings and diversifying into adjacent areas. Many want to generate fresh revenue streams from new products and services while simultaneously unlocking new value pools. The appeal of this approach, where interconnected services allow users to address various cross-sector needs through one unified experience, has grown even stronger with the accelerating shift to digital platforms. The rise of Generative AI hastened that shift and is now boosted by more advanced technologies such as Agentic AI, predictive analytics, and data-driven personalization.

According to recent surveys, 71 percent of consumers report that they are ready for integrated ecosystems, suggesting there is a palpable demand for businesses to innovate, coordinate, and interlink their services. By 2030, the integrated network economy could account for about 25 percent of the global economy, up significantly from the current 1 to 2 percent, with estimates putting revenues at around $70 trillion (Exhibit 1). This marks a dramatic rise from just a few years ago when ecosystem thinking was often relegated to niche conversations. Today, however, the growing interest and demand underscore that an ecosystem approach cuts across industries from retail and consumer goods to finance, insurance, healthcare, and beyond. The financial markets have taken notice, rewarding companies that adopt ecosystem models and succeed in capturing cross-sector value. However, shifting to an ecosystem strategy and making it profitable can be difficult.

Recent research from Santiago & Company reveals that only about 50 percent of enterprises attempting ecosystem plays report limited early success, while just ~10 percent show substantial revenue gains. Crafting interconnected services to address customers’ needs across multiple industries demands an overarching strategy prioritizing customer-focused design. It’s not enough merely to envision how services might link; every step of the way, companies must commit to a design-led approach that treats the user experience as the central driver of success.

This article explores three key phases of ecosystem adoption: (1) defining the strategy, (2) designing the ecosystem, and (3) building the ecosystem. These phases describe how design-led thinking contributes during each phase. We also illustrate these concepts through the story of a grocery retailer that leveraged an ecosystem model to expand beyond its core offerings into other consumer sectors. This move enabled the company to ward off intensifying threats from competitors, both established and emerging and generated significant new value streams in areas that were once well outside the retailer’s traditional scope.

A design-led approach to ecosystem planning

The design has long been hailed as a powerful tool for driving strategic business decisions, mainly when companies set their sights on bold, transformative goals. When organizations embed design into their culture, they often discover new ways to develop intuitive, engaging products and experiences that precisely address customers’ needs. In turn, they can disrupt markets, reinvent established categories, and consistently create meaningful innovations at scale.

Pursuing an ecosystem strategy is a long-range, transformative endeavor that unfolds through three interconnected phases: defining the ecosystem strategy, designing it, and finally building it out. Each phase benefits from critical design disciplines such as design research, visual and interaction design, user interface design, and especially service design. Service design, which focuses on how multiple touchpoints coalesce into one cohesive offering, is particularly vital in ecosystem thinking because it allows the business to connect different industry sectors (or micro-verticals) into a fluid system that feels consistent from the user’s perspective.

Define the ecosystem strategy

Many business leaders find it challenging to identify which ecosystems to invest in or how to prioritize potential opportunities that could yield the highest impact. Bringing design-oriented thinking to the earliest stages of strategic planning makes the organization more likely to uncover meaningful insights about where and how to compete. Specifically, three focal points can help guide the strategic definition:

1. Identify the most relevant trends. Consumer needs and preferences evolve due to social, economic, and technological shifts. Over the past decade, for instance, the emergence of social commerce, mobile-first platforms, and advanced artificial intelligence has led to new ways of shopping, banking, and accessing healthcare. Design forecasting, which combines data analysis with creative scenario building, allows companies to envision how these changes might escalate or pivot in the future. By studying these trends, organizations can imagine how consumers might alter their behaviors, what they may need next, and in which new directions the company could extend its products or services. Designers bring a unique strength in divergent and convergent thinking, enabling the organization to explore expansive possibilities (for instance, digital health offerings or integrated financial services) and then narrow those possibilities into feasible strategic directions.
2. Plan a desirable ecosystem and identify the value pools. Once leaders have identified a few promising areas, the next step is sizing up which of those have the most significant relevance, growth potential, and alignment with the organization’s capabilities. This often requires a combination of quantitative measures such as market-sizing exercises, value-pool analyses, and financial feasibility studies and qualitative inputs like ethnographic research, in-depth consumer interviews, and competitor benchmarking. By applying design-research methods, the organization can uncover the emotional, practical, and social factors that influence consumers’ decisions or embrace new services. This context allows leaders to pinpoint which specific offerings, customer segments, or cross-sector connections might offer the most significant value.
3. Tightly define the core value proposition. Many companies overlook the importance of a crystal-clear, distinctive advantage when they jump into ecosystems. The temptation is to spread efforts across multiple channels or products without unearthing the singular reason a customer would choose the integrated suite. Design-led co-creation sessions can help the organization combine market trends, brand strengths, and data insights into a unifying vision. These sessions produce a range of new solutions by opening the conversation to product leaders, operations, design teams, and even external partners. From there, leaders can evaluate which solutions best align with the company’s business ambitions, proprietary capabilities, and consumer needs. The ultimate goal is to commit to a compelling value proposition for the ecosystem, one that appeals to a substantial number of users and leverages the company’s unique strengths in ways that competitors cannot easily replicate.

Design the ecosystem

Once leaders know where they want to play, they must translate that strategic direction into a tangible system that users will love. The effort involves orchestrating three essential domains: (1) consumers, (2) cross-sector partners, and (3) products and services. Underpinning all of these focuses on how people will move seamlessly through the ecosystem, often through a blend of physical and digital channels.

Consumers

Ecosystem design starts by considering how users will experience every stage of the customer journey. This begins with mapping consumer journeys in detail: a step-by-step account of the interactions people have and the challenges they might face. Done well, journey mapping gives the organization a panoramic view of how different offerings converge to solve various needs. For instance, a grocery chain that ventures into insurance might visualize a scenario in which a customer logs into the grocer’s app, places a grocery order, notices an insurance offer targeted to their profile, and can quickly receive a quote and purchase coverage.

Designers then create a service blueprint, which sits alongside the journey map. The service blueprint links each user interaction to the underlying operational, technological, and staffing requirements needed to deliver that experience. For example, if users can compare insurance premiums while checking out groceries, the blueprint might specify how to blend e-commerce data with external insurance databases, ensuring a frictionless user flow. The blueprint also sheds light on any new digital capabilities or partnerships that will be required and necessary investments in data privacy, cybersecurity, and customer support.

Striking the right balance is critical. An ecosystem that tries to cover too many categories at once can deliver a watered-down, impersonal experience. Conversely, an too narrowly focused ecosystem might underwhelm potential customers who expect broader options. Often, leaders choose a focus area where they can deliver a robust experience, prove its value, and expand outward from that initial beachhead.

Sectors and partners

A hallmark of ecosystem thinking is that it operates across sector boundaries, bringing together industries that traditionally functioned in isolation. This cross-industry connectivity can be transformative, but it also requires careful design to mask the inherent complexity from the user. For instance, buying groceries and arranging for insurance coverage are, at first glance, entirely separate processes. Yet the ecosystems that enable these transitions in just a few clicks create significant value for users who prefer an integrated, time-saving experience.

Design plays a pivotal role here by visualizing how partnerships link business processes behind the scenes. The question becomes: How do we ensure that a user’s grocery profile, shopping habits, loyalty points, or payment preferences automatically enable them to explore insurance options or even an apparel purchase without needing to re-enter their data or manage multiple apps? A well-orchestrated ecosystem, shaped by talented designers, prevents the consumer from feeling like they are continually jumping between isolated platforms. It’s precisely this sense of frictionless continuity that can differentiate an ecosystem in the marketplace.

Partner relationships can be equally complex. Negotiating data-sharing protocols, establishing brand guidelines for a unified user experience, and often setting mutual success metrics involve repeated collaboration among diverse teams. Designers can help illustrate scenarios that clarify how each partnership fits into the larger journey, making it easier for all parties to see the end goal.

Products and services

After mapping out journeys and drafting service blueprints, companies must transform their vision into connected offerings, physical, digital, or both. At this stage, teams frequently consider whether to build a “super app” that places multiple services under one digital roof or whether a more modular approach would be more effective. Some organizations opt for a suite of interconnected applications, each specialized to a particular need but seamlessly sharing user data behind the scenes.

Rigorous testing at this juncture saves time and resources later. Companies can run pilot programs with target users to validate that the end-to-end journey feels intuitive, that the technology works reliably, and that the brand experience remains coherent across all touchpoints. In parallel, designers and product owners must align with business leaders on the technical architecture through microservices, APIs, or an enterprise platform that can scale to millions of users. Clear success metrics are also essential, allowing teams to measure adoption rates, customer satisfaction scores, and revenue growth across each new ecosystem feature.

Ultimately, a design-led methodology ensures that these products and services, while robust in their technology, stay anchored to user needs. The result is a connected ecosystem that feels like a single, unified brand expression rather than a series of loosely assembled capabilities.

Creating value across all sectors

A large grocery retailer found itself under growing pressure in its main business line selling groceries because both established incumbents and nimble tech-based start-ups were claiming more market share. Digital-native competitors wielded advanced analytics and streamlined delivery networks, eroding the retailer’s margins and threatening its loyalty base.

To stay ahead, executives decided to explore growth opportunities in adjacent sectors, particularly apparel, healthcare, and insurance. Yet attempts to tackle these areas separately quickly became cumbersome. Each new vertical demanded its own partnerships, digital integrations, and marketing tactics, and leaders worried that customers would see the company as fragmented or scattered. Determined to avoid this pitfall, the retailer adopted a customer-centric ecosystem approach. Rather than simply tacking on new services, it reimagined the user experience so people could move fluidly from groceries to other sectors. This approach harnessed shared loyalty data, omnichannel platforms, and streamlined messaging, ensuring that the new offerings were perceived as a natural extension of the core brand. Over time, this interconnected model protected the retailer from intensified competition and laid the groundwork for continuous innovation across each consumer category.

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Build the ecosystem

Designing an ecosystem on paper is one thing; bringing it to life and scaling it requires an agile, adaptive operating model. The aim is to continually launch or improve services, manage a complex portfolio of value propositions, and reorient quickly when market dynamics change. Achieving this degree of flexibility often demands cultural shifts that can be challenging but ultimately rewarding.

One significant shift is to embed design leaders into the transformation from day one. If designers exist only as a separate “design department,” their perspectives risk being overlooked at critical junctures, such as strategic investment decisions or key technical architecture discussions. Instead, when designers work side by side with business strategists, developers, data scientists, and product owners, they can help solve problems holistically, ensuring that user needs remain paramount throughout the innovation process. This arrangement encourages more robust ideation cycles, streamlined product iterations, and better alignment between the original vision and the final implementation.

Another shift is implementing a governance model that fully integrates design into the ecosystem’s operating structure (Exhibit 2). This model clarifies roles and responsibilities across the product life cycle, specifying how design methods like customer journey mapping, prototyping, or user testing fit into every stage. It also sets out what happens if these methods are ignored. For instance, bypassing early-stage user research could result in misaligned priorities or a mismatch between the product’s capabilities and market needs. Similarly, designing journeys without referencing the backstage blueprint might lead to inconsistencies or technical gaps that hamper user adoption.

Leadership from both design and other functions must reinforce this governance model, consistently highlighting the significance of design principles in everything from strategic planning to final delivery. The organization can cultivate a shared language and an appreciation for a design-led mindset through regular training, “lunch and learn” sessions, and cross-functional design workshops. Over time, these efforts shift the culture so that design thinking becomes second nature in solving challenges and harnessing fresh opportunities.

As businesses adapt to a post-pandemic world, the drive to innovate and grow has become more urgent. Ecosystem strategies, emphasizing integrated experiences and cross-sector offerings, are at the forefront of this momentum. From new digital products to omnichannel services that merge online and offline touchpoints, companies recognize that the key to differentiation lies in unwavering customer centricity, cutting-edge design principles, and a willingness to experiment, measure, and refine. With artificial intelligence rapidly reshaping what’s possible and consumer expectations rising, the bar for ecosystem success will only climb higher.

Companies seeking to capitalize on this moment of change should embed design thinking at every level, from the initial ecosystem strategy to the day-to-day processes of building and iterating solutions. By doing so, they can gain a decisive edge in crafting experiences that attract and retain customers while staying ahead of emerging competitors. Ultimately, a design-led approach equips organizations with the clarity, agility, and creativity they need to thrive in tomorrow’s interconnected economy.

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