-: Companies in many industries
have significantly invested into digital ecosystems
over the past years,
and that was an important move
for them to be able to compete against the startups
that are entering their space.
However, now in the economic downturn,
we actually notice that many of those companies
made the decision to stop those investments
because they have proven to be hard.
They take quite a while to build up
those digital ecosystems.
But I would like to argue that this is a very bad choice.
It's a difficult timing to do this at this very moment.
The reason for that is actually in downturns,
digital ecosystems are even more important
than in regular times.
If you look at the top line,
digital ecosystems would allow those companies
to actually be much more flexible
in offering new kinds of solutions to customers,
new products, new offerings by partnering more flexibly.
And on the bottom line,
especially if you think about supply chain,
we saw all the issues by the traditional supply chains,
where you actually are dependent
on many different suppliers.
If you would have digital ecosystem approach with platforms
with hundreds of different players
where you have direct interconnections,
that would also give you substantially more flexibility
in those more difficult times.
And the last argument I would make
is actually we've seen that technology companies
have laid off significantly people over the last year.
So now is actually the time to acquire that talent,
build on it, use them to also leverage
and get into digital ecosystems,
and really make yourself the winner in the downturn.