How digital ecosystem management experts are sharing best practices

Over the last five years I have carried out research into 5G business models, and ecosystems, publishing insights and sharing best practices. My work as a research scientist for Telenor R&I has predominantly focused on European Union 5G and 6G projects and the 5G Public and Private Partnership (5G PPP), but in 2022 I had the honor to be invited to join the team of great experts leading TM Forum’s project on Digital Ecosystem Management (DEM).

When contributing to the TM Forum project’s beta version of its Ecosystem Modelling framework, I could draw on my experience of undertaking concrete analysis of ecosystems. The concept of a market as an ecosystem is easy to recognize in its mature form, but more challenging to capture in its early phases due to dependencies, reinforcement effects, and uncertainties. Not least, to embark on kicking off an ecosystem requires the existence of a value proposition addressing a real problem which only can be solved by partners together.

During spring 2023 my role was that of observing and applauding the work of TM Forum's Digital Ecosystem Management team as it developed its latest guidebook, the Concept to Design Framework.

The guidebook is comprehensive, taking the developer from ideation and market assessment, via stakeholder capability assessments, into developing the business ecosystem strategy, and finally preparing business cases. Personally, I welcome that the framework explicitly requires a decision on whether building the market in question requires a partnership. To partner implies that your firm must create values for users and customers jointly, but also to extract and share the profit. The new Concept to Design Framework can lean on a large base of existing TM Forum guides and resources and promises to be of great help for telecommunication actors which seek new 5G and 6G business opportunities, and beyond connectivity.

As a researcher dedicated to business and ecosystems, since 2020 I have chaired a sub-working group in the 6G Industry Association on 5G “Business Validation, Models, and Ecosystems”. Our expert group across many projects has worked to collect, share, and develop best practices for how to explore business opportunities with 5G. The three white papers we have produced first suggest that before working with business models, a customer’s problem must be identified and turned into a value proposition: Business Validation in 5G PPP Vertical Use Cases, 2020. Second, we found it important to suggest more clearly what a 5G ecosystem is, suggesting the terms 5G Provisioning Ecosystem and 5G Vertical 5G Ecosystems: 5G Ecosystems, 2021. Finally, we published a white paper on doing business modelling for the single firm, in a 5G ecosystem context: 5G and Beyond 5G Ecosystem Business Modelling, 2023.

My work with these white papers over several years has enabled and inspired me to take learnings into TM Forum’s Digital Ecosystem Management project. The 6G IA white papers and TM Forum frameworks are complementary, with the Concept to Design Framework diving into methods in much more detail and I recommend the 6G IA white papers as additional learnings for TM forum members. Furthermore, it is interesting to observe that in our wider community, we are all coming forward to improve our ability to pursue business opportunities beyond our current domains when we are dependent on partners in an ecosystem.

As a final observation, in future we must all cater to sustainability when developing technologies and building businesses – we cannot do things today which violate future interests. On this note, our white paper on 5G and beyond 5G Ecosystem Business Modelling suggests approaches for how to do sustainability-oriented 5G and beyond 5G business modelling. Luckily, ecosystem frameworks’ emphasis on the many stakeholders’ and their concerns in a systemic market evolution and is a good foundation for carrying out sustainability analyses. So, let us keep up joining forces within and across our different interest groups to expand our capabilities further.