Treating Ecosystems as a new asset class

Appreciating Assets as a new Ecosystem accounting class

Current accounting fails ecosystems. Traditional accounting assumes assets wear out, value declines with use and treats relationships as expense, knowledge is seen as overheads, coordination is a cost and trust is intangible and is left untracked.

Ecosystem assets are the capital class that becomes more valuable every time it is used. Investing in them is not a cost – it is the foundation of compounding advantage. In some ways applying this logic offers a real breakthrough, it reframes the entire investment conversation in ecosystems – and you can turn compounding from a metaphor into a management system.

It is time for us to consider treating Ecosystem assets as an appreciating capital asset class – because they grow stronger through use – and our accounting must shift from measuring cost/return to measuring what is being built and how fast it appreciates.

* Depreciation logic was built for assets to die.**

The Business Ecosystem Architecture needs to be Executive-Ready

Accelerating inside our existing system is increasingly hard

Most organisations today are trying to move faster than the system they sit inside.
The slowdown isn’t execution. It’s structural.

They are operating inside ecosystems —
but without an ecosystem architecture.

And that missing architecture is now one of the most important, least recognised constraints on growth, innovation, and transformation.

Underestimating what ecosystems really need

Most companies still underestimate what “ecosystem” really means and why they need to go deeper into the causes of their Ecosystems not delivering what they would want. .

They think it’s a partner program. Or a platform. Or a digital initiative. Or a slide with circles and arrows.

But here’s the shift that’s already happening — quietly, structurally, and faster than most leaders realise:

Your business is no longer operating in a market. It’s operating in an ecosystem.

And that changes everything.

Business Ecosystems are more than your Companies thinks they are

Recently I have been evaluating a cohort of Seven leading companies on where they are on Business Ecosystem thinking

The seven organizations are

Hitachi Energy
ABB
Maersk
Johnson Controls
DHL
Allianz
Siemens Healthineers (not Siemens AG)

Firstly you gain the universal tension they all feel

Firstly, it seems every company is caught in the same structural bind:

Their value creation now depends on actors they don’t control
(utilities, ports, regulators, integrators, OEMs, hospitals, carriers, developers, insurers, cities).
Their strategic bets require multi‑actor coordination
(energy transition, digital grids, smart buildings, logistics visibility, embedded insurance, connected care).
Their existing operating model is built for bilateral relationships, not multi‑actor ecosystems.
Their platforms and digital initiatives have already shown the limits of “technology + partners.”

This is their shared pain point they all can elevate into a compelling need for Ecosystem change if they have the 1)ambition and desire and 2) the understanding of what it takes..

The Architecture of Ecosystems — What It Actually Takes

The Architecture of Ecosystems — Do you recognize what it actually takes?

Many Business Ecosystems are not as well designed as they can be. Often, we are at the problem recognition level. Do we ever go beyond this to recognize the architectural specificity is missing and this is essential.

Do you have a real sense of what that architecture actually consists of or why its categorically different from everything you have tried before?

You now recognize the problem. The system is resisting you. The tools you built were designed for a different world. The structural layer never emerged.

But recognition is not enough.

The question every leader reaches at this point is the same: what would it actually mean to have an ecosystem architecture — and what does one consist of?

That question deserves a precise answer. Not a framework. Not a methodology. An architectural answer.

The Ecosystem Journey we all must travel for today’s business challenges

I have found the the intellectual journey of Ecosystem design tough, challenging but rewarding but have built a framework that supports business organizations to navigate this.

The Intelligent Interconnected Business Ecosystem (IIBE) did not emerge from theory. It was forged across two decades of sustained work at the intersection of strategy, technology, and organisational design — diagnosing real ecosystems, resolving real strategic tensions, and building the pattern recognition that only comes from repeated engagement with complex systems at the point where their coherence breaks down.

It synthesises and extends across five bodies of thinking:

— Platform economics and network theory — extended beyond transaction-based logic to structural ecosystem intelligence

— Ecosystem strategy thinking — given diagnostic precision and causal architecture it previously lacked

— Systems thinking and complexity science — made operationally usable rather than theoretically descriptive

— AI and intelligence integration — grounded in human meaning-making rather than deployed as isolated analytical capability

— Organisational capability building — scaled across actors the enterprise does not control

This synthesis is not borrowed. No other framework holds these domains in productive tension simultaneously. The IIBE exists because the intersections between them — where the most significant strategic tensions in complex ecosystems actually live — required an architecture that none of them individually could provide.

The Compound Value and Growth Logic Of Business Ecosystems

Recognising We Have A Problem with ‘Scale’

What scale logic assumes

Scale logic rests on a clear set of assumptions: inputs are replicable, processes are stable, and growth comes from doing more of a proven thing with greater efficiency. These assumptions are well-suited to manufacturing, standardised service delivery, and transactional platforms with high volume and low variance. They have produced enormous value in those contexts.

But they embed a hidden constraint: the system produces more output without necessarily becoming more capable. A scaled organisation is a bigger version of itself. It is not a structurally different one. The growth is additive. The returns are, at best, linear — and increasingly sub-linear as competitive imitation narrows differentiation and regulatory, environmental, and labour costs compress margins.

Where scale logic fails ecosystems

Ecosystems are not linear value chains with more participants. They are systems in which the primary assets — relationships, knowledge, trust, combinatorial capability — behave differently from physical or transactional assets. They appreciate through use. They generate network effects. They produce emergent value that no single participant designed or controls.

BEYOND SCALE — We are facing a Rupture

1. The Rupture: The Logic We Inherited No Longer Fits the World We’re In

For decades, organisations have been taught to ask a single question whenever they encounter something promising, unfamiliar, or strategically important:

“How does this scale?”

It is a reasonable question.
It is also the question that quietly undermines every serious attempt at ecosystem strategy.

The problem is not the intent behind the question.
The problem is the worldview beneath it.

Scale logic was built for a world of depreciating assets — a world where machines wore out, software aged, knowledge expired, and relationships were costs to be minimized. A world where value declined through use. A world where growth meant doing more of the same, faster, with greater efficiency.

Siemens is succeeding. That is exactly when governance gets dangerous.

The hardest ceilings are the ones you approach while everything around you still looks like progress.

Siemens has built something real. Real industrial reach. Real data gravity. Real presence across manufacturing, energy, mobility and healthcare. The most credible industrial ecosystem of its generation – built over decades, not months, on relationships and infrastructure that competitors cannot simply replicate.

And yet.

You Named It. Now Own It.

A direct response to the seven European CEOs who wrote an open letter, — with the EU Directorate in mind — and also to every large-company leader in Europe watching this unfold.

By Paul Hobcraft | Creator, IIBE Framework | Ecosystems4Innovating | May 2026

This week, seven of Europe’s most significant technology CEOs did something genuinely rare.

Christophe Fouquet, Guillaume Faury, Börje Ekholm, Arthur Mensch, Justin Hotard, Christian Klein, and Roland Busch agreed on a single text, signed it together, and pushed it into national newspapers across eight countries. These CEO’s represent ASML, Airbus, Ericsson, Mistral AI, Nokia, SAP, and Siemens.

€417 billion in revenues.

€1.1 trillion in market capitalisation.

957,000 high-tech jobs.

€40 billion in annual R&D.

213,000 patents.

That is not a symbolic gesture. That is sovereign-scale industrial weight applied to a public argument.

And the argument is correct: Europe keeps inventing what others end up scaling. Fragmented markets. Overlapping rules. A regulatory reflex that governs rather than builds. A capital union still on paper.

I respect the letter. I respect what it took to produce it.

But I want to say something directly to those seven leaders — and to every CEO of a large European company reading this:

You named it. That means you now own it.

*** Depreciation logic was built for assets to die.