“Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work”
— Peter F. Drucker*

From platform to ecosystem competition
The accelerating pace of digital transformation and global change is outpacing traditional business models, requiring companies to evolve toward more adaptive organizations. One solution is business ecosystems, which are inherently more resilient and flexible. Fortunately, technology has evolved to meet these demands. Today’s digital transformation depends on data, relevant to your business, high-quality, (near) real-time, and shared across company boundaries. Well, timing is everything as they say, and fortunately, new tech, dataspace technology, has emerged to unlock these flows by enabling secure, sovereign data sharing across supply chains and ecosystems. It provides the essential data fuel to drive cross-company collaboration and powers differentiated AI—trained on proprietary data that reflects your unique business practices and amplifies competitive advantage. With a decentralized architecture, much like the Internet, it is purpose-built for ecosystem-based collaboration.With the first data ecosystems, such as Catena-X, already taking shape, companies may urgently want to upgrade their capabilities to avoid being outflanked by faster, more agile intruders or new entrants. One top strategic priority? Building expertise in data sovereignty and governance, ensuring control over critical data assets internally while enabling external collaboration, even in competitive and uncertain scenarios.

Teaming with organizational science experts next door

• Our DCL institute intimately understands how emerging dataspace technology can unlock the full potential of ecosystems—drawing from firsthand experience developing the key software stack in Catena-X consortium and the Tractus-X Eclipse Foundation project … to privileged access to lighthouse implementation projects; and together with our co-founder, Drucker Chair, and leading customer centricity advocate Bernie Jaworski, we ensure business case and use case success stories from the end-user’s perspective.
• Recognizing that ecosystems are as much about organizational design and corporate governance as they are about technology and business use cases, we are proud to partner with our neighbouring institute, the Center for the Future of Organization, led by our esteemed colleague Roland Deiser. His center is known for its C-level advisory and roundtables with leading experts, such as Tom Davenport and Martin Reeves, chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute.

“Nothing beats results” – Join us … please check it out:
Schlueter Langdon, C. 2025. From platform to ecosystem competition. Research Note (RN_DCL-Drucker-CGU_2025-04_V3), Drucker Customer Lab, Drucker School of Management, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA

* Drucker, P. 1967. The Effective Executive. Harper & Row: New York, NY