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Developing business ideas for drone technologies
Developing business ideas for drone technologies

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1.1 Business interactions and ecosystems

It is typical for a business to interact with other businesses, organisations and their end-users. But how can ecosystems in business and management be identified? This can be challenging because of the complexity of ecosystems; so to start, let’s look at a broad definition of ecosystems in business:

‘in management and economics, the term [ecosystems] is now widely used to denote a network of autonomous economic actors interacting to create value, including a complementary surplus, which is distributed across actors.’

(Baldwin et al, 2024, p. 1)

The actors of an ecosystem are independent and can include any type of organisation or even individuals. At the same time, actors in an ecosystem complement each other and this is the basis for creating aggregate value that is more than the sum of its parts. In other words, the joint action and interdependencies across such actors create surplus joint value. Interactions among actors are based on various bilateral and multi-lateral agreements, such as contracts, exchange relations, negotiations and standards.

Another principle of an ecosystem is that its products and processes are parts of a broader architecture. Oftentimes in practice this is the technical architecture of a product. For example, think of the production of the Boeing aircraft, with different parts (engine, wings) produced by different actors (Rolls-Royce and Mitsubishi) located in different countries. By using complex processes, these parts are brought together in the final product architecture, the aircraft itself.

This is just an introductory example, and the sections that follow offer examples from other products from daily life (see Section 6). In this week you will also discuss examples of drone ecosystems such as the one portrayed in Figure 7 in Section 6.