By Miklos Dietz, Hamza Khan, and Istvan Rab – McKinsey Digital
While ecosystem-building has been a red-hot topic in the business world in recent years, the COVID-19 crisis has amplified the importance of digital interactions and will likely further accelerate the adoption of digital-ecosystem business models. Our global consumer sentiment surveys indicate that the spike in online sales will continue to some extent even after the crisis is over, and that 71 percent of consumers are ready for integrated, ecosystem offerings. Business-to-business interactions are changing too. For example, in April 2020 in the US, 80 percent of business-to-business sales teams had shifted to remote working, and businesses rated digitally-enabled interactions with business-to-business customers as being twice as important as traditional methods, a 30 percent increase compared to the start of the crisis.
Most global companies are now actively considering the ecosystem business model given its value-generation potential: growing the core business, expanding the network and portfolio, and generating revenues from new products and services. The integrated network economy could represent a global revenue pool of $60 trillion in 2025 with a potential increase in total economy share from about 1 to 2 percent today to approximately 30 percent by 2025.
