Route A
Begin a confidential conversation
Founder to founder. No deck, no pitch.
ECOSYSTEM BUILDING
Den Boden schaffen, auf dem andere stehen.
Gründer und Institutionen, die Ecosystems rund um das aufbauen, was sie geschaffen haben — und Forscher, die darüber nachdenken, wie Ecosystems funktionieren. Vier Phasen: zusammenbringen, pflegen, verteidigen, übergeben. Aufgebaut auf dem Meet Magento Fall (2012–2019, 60+ Länder) und einem laufenden Forschungsprogramm zu Ecosystem Design.
THE FOUR PHASES
What ecosystem-building actually looks like.
- 01Convene
Bringing participants into the room — partners, contributors, customers, sometimes competitors. The founding act: making participation worth showing up for. Without this, no ecosystem exists.
- 02Water
Sustaining participation over years. Newsletters are not watering. Tending to specific contributor needs — visibility, recognition, sometimes money, and the steady reminder that they matter. The work most ecosystem-builders underestimate.
- 03Defend
Protecting what's been built. From extractive participants, from platform changes, from boredom, from the founder's own restlessness. The phase most ecosystem owners enter without realising they're in it.
- 04Hand over
Distributing leadership and authority before the founder runs out. The phase where most ecosystems fail. The Meet Magento case is one of the few that did not.
Most ecosystems fail at the hand-over. We have done the work all four phases — including the rare one. Both as practitioners and as researchers, we sit with the question of what makes an ecosystem survive its founder.
MEET MAGENTO ASSOCIATION (2012–2019)
Distributed-leadership ecosystem across 60+ countries. Convened, watered, defended, and handed over to the Magento Association — a test most ecosystems fail.
Three ways to engage with the case:
- Tier 1 — Public overview — Timeline, geographic scope, governance overview, transition narrative. (This block is the Tier 1 view.)
- Tier 2 — Full dossier — Detailed timeline, governance mechanics, growth dynamics, methodology notes, open research questions.Request dossier →
- Tier 3 — Research-partner access — Internal records, named contributions, quantitative data, under data-use agreement, case by case.Request research access →
From the field
Frequently asked questions
What's the difference between platform, community, and ecosystem?
Platform: the technical and economic substrate on which contributions and uses are built. Community: the people and organisations who contribute, use, and coordinate around the platform. Ecosystem: the broader environment of actors and institutions whose dynamics shape what the platform and community can do. These definitions are working tools, not final claims. We use them because treating the three terms as interchangeable produces sloppy analysis.
What is in the Meet Magento case dossier, and how do I access it?
Three tiers of access. Tier 1 — timeline, geographic scope, governance overview, and transition into the Magento Association — sits on the public partnerships page. Tier 2 — the full case dossier with detailed timeline, governance mechanics, growth dynamics, methodology notes, and open research questions — is available on request via a short note explaining your interest. Tier 3 — internal records, named contributions, quantitative data — is available to research partners under a data-use agreement on a case-by-case basis.
Can we co-author a research paper or case?
Yes. Joint publications, supervised student work, and co-authored teaching cases are all formats we have discussed with academic partners. The Meet Magento case is being developed into longer-form research material; there is room for collaboration around it. The conversation usually starts with a short note about your research question or institutional context.
Do you teach at universities, or speak at academic conferences?
Selectively. The firm has done substantial literature work on ecosystem design at academic depth. Teaching and conference appearances are not the primary work of the firm, but where they advance research or strengthen institutional relationships, they happen.
Are you studying ecosystems beyond Magento?
The Meet Magento case is the documented practitioner case, and it is the empirical anchor for the current research. The methodology applies more broadly, and we observe ecosystem patterns across platforms and communities in different domains as part of advisory work. But there is no second documented practitioner case at Meet Magento's scale — and we do not pretend there is. The research programme is open and growing.
Two ways to start
Route B
Request the Meet Magento dossier
Full case dossier released into specific conversations rather than published.