You can’t win an ecosystem alone.
The Business Ecosystems Game lets participants experience what happens when organisational success depends not only on your own strategy, but also on the health of the system around you.
Teams compete for position, resources and opportunities — then discover that sustainable advantage requires collaboration, alignment and collective value creation.
Your strategy can work. And the system can still fail.
Most strategy focuses on optimising one organisation. Ecosystem strategy requires a different perspective.
Innovation increasingly depends on customers, suppliers, partners, complementors, institutions and competitors whose decisions influence one another.
That creates a fundamental tension. Every organisation wants to strengthen its own position, but extracting too much value, withholding resources or failing to coordinate can weaken the very ecosystem on which everyone depends.
The Business Ecosystems Game makes that tension tangible. Participants have to pursue their own objectives while learning when competition creates progress — and when collaboration becomes necessary to create more value for the system as a whole.
At first, other teams look like competitors.
Then players realise they may need them to make the ecosystem work.
First optimise your position. Then confront interdependence.
Each round adds consequences. Decisions that make sense for one organisation can change opportunities, incentives and system performance for everyone else.
Position
Build capabilities, pursue opportunities and strengthen your organisation’s role in the ecosystem.
Compete
Other players pursue their own objectives. Resources, opportunities and value are contested.
Connect
Dependencies become visible. Partnerships, exchanges and complementary capabilities begin to matter.
Coordinate
Players discover where individual action is no longer enough and collective choices are required.
Shape
Teams learn how strategic behaviour can strengthen — or weaken — the ecosystem they all depend on.
Your spreadsheet doesn’t negotiate.
Ecosystems are not simply networks on a diagram. They are made up of actors with different goals, information, resources and perceptions.
During the simulation, players have to talk. They negotiate, exchange information, form alliances, reconsider relationships and decide who they can trust.
The network matters.
But behaviour makes the network work.
Ecosystems are not one problem. They are several nested problems.
Collaborative leadership
How do people lead, influence, negotiate and collaborate when formal authority is limited?
Firm strategy & capabilities
How does an organisation build its own position while accessing capabilities beyond its boundaries?
Relationships & orchestration
Which actors need one another, where is value created, and who can coordinate collective action?
Ecosystem dynamics
How do local decisions accumulate into system-level growth, stagnation, resilience or collapse?
From individual behaviour to system dynamics.
The simulation connects concepts across multiple levels rather than treating ecosystem strategy as a single framework.
Same system. Different conversations.
The simulation can be integrated into formal education, used as an executive intervention or run as an intensive facilitated ecosystem workshop.
Course-integrated Ecosystem Simulation
Run the simulation over several days or weeks alongside a course on ecosystems, innovation, entrepreneurship or strategy.
- 4–7 simulation rounds
- Online or blended delivery
- Learning materials and assignments
- Optional lectures and webinars
- Suitable for larger cohorts
Executive Ecosystem Lab
Use the simulation to explore collaboration, ecosystem strategy and interdependence with professionals or leadership teams.
- Typically 5–6 facilitated sessions
- Customisation possible
- Online, blended or on location
- Individual and team reflection
- Can connect to your own ecosystem challenge
Ecosystem Masterclass
Create an intensive shared experience in which participants can immediately explore ecosystem behaviour and discuss its implications.
- Half-day, full-day or 2/3-day format
- Fully facilitated
- Ideal for professional development
- Strong emphasis on interaction and reflection
- Works as standalone intervention
Try the mechanics. The ecosystem adds another layer.
The current online trial demonstrates the underlying decision-making logic shared with the Innovation Management Game.
The Business Ecosystems Game builds on that foundation by adding interdependence between teams, ecosystem-level outcomes and the tension between competition and collective performance.
Explore the trial →In the ecosystem simulation, your result is no longer determined by your decisions alone.
Used across education and professional learning.
Innovative Dutch simulations have been used by universities, business schools and organisations internationally.
What if winning requires helping the system win?
Tell us who the participants are and which ecosystem challenge you want them to explore. We can run the standard simulation or connect the programme to your own context.