Major Shifts in Management Thinking Over Twenty Years – Shift #7 – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #1190

Major Shifts in Management Thinking Over Twenty Years – Shift #7 – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #1190

Dear Colleagues! This is Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #1190 for Pharma Veterans. Pharma Veterans Blogs are published by Asrar Qureshi on its dedicated site https://pharmaveterans.com. Please email to pharmaveterans2017@gmail.com  for publishing your contributions here.

Credit: Arina Krasnikova

Credit: August de Richelieu

Credit: Juairia Islam Shefa

Preamble

This series shall explore major shifts in management thinking and paradigm shifts over the last twenty years.

Shift #7 – The New Competitive Advantage: Why Collaboration and Ecosystems Are Replacing Traditional Competition

Competition has been at the heart of management philosophy. Companies fought rival firms for market share. They protected their intellectual property fiercely. They built moats, defended turf, and played zero-sum games. Winning meant beating the other players on the field.

But the last twenty years have changed that logic profoundly. Today, many of the world’s most successful companies are not the ones that outperform competitors alone; they are the ones that build ecosystems, form partnerships, tap into networks, and create platforms where value is co-created instead of protected. The shift from competition to ecosystems and collaboration is one of the most transformative developments in modern management thinking.

This new approach doesn’t reject competition altogether, rather, it reframes it. Companies now compete as networks, not as isolated entities. They compete on the strength of their ecosystems, their alliances, and their capacity to collaborate in ways that expand value for all stakeholders.

Why Traditional Competition Is No Longer Enough

The traditional view, firms fighting for dominance inside well-defined industries has been destabilized by several powerful forces.

Industries Are Converging. Boundaries that once separated industries are dissolving. Tech companies move into finance, Pharma companies collaborate with AI startups, telecom companies launch financial services, and automotive firms now build software and energy solutions. When industries overlap, competition becomes too complex to navigate alone. No company has expertise in every domain, so partnerships become necessary to survive.

Innovation Requires Diverse Capabilities. Breakthroughs rarely happen within a single organization’s four walls. Modern innovation is inherently interdisciplinary. A new product may require AI algorithms, cloud infrastructure, regulatory expertise, manufacturing partners, distribution networks, and embedded financial or data services. No single company can master all of this. The only way to innovate at speed is to draw on ecosystems of partners.

Customers Expect Integrated Solutions. They don’t want products only; they want seamless experiences. Consider a smartphone that integrates cloud storage, payments, apps, and health data, car connected to chargers, AI navigation, mobility services, and insurance, or a healthcare solution that blends diagnostics, telemedicine, pharma, and data insights. One company cannot deliver this alone. Ecosystems are the only way to meet holistic customer needs.

Technology Has Enabled Massive Interconnectedness. APIs, cloud platforms, digital marketplaces, open-source software, and real-time data flows make collaboration easier than ever. Technology has rewired how companies plug into each other—and how value chains are formed and reformed.

The Rise of Ecosystems as the Dominant Business Model

An ecosystem is more than a network of partners. It is a living, adaptive structure where value is co-created, shared, and continuously expanded. Every major industry has seen the rise of ecosystem orchestrators:

Apple built the App Store ecosystem.

Amazon built third-party seller platforms and AWS ecosystems.

Google built Android and a universe of developer and business integrations.

Tesla built a charging, energy, battery, and software ecosystem.

Alibaba built interconnected marketplaces, payments, logistics, and cloud offerings.

Pfizer, Moderna, and BioNTech partnered across borders during COVID, regulators, tech companies, supply chains, academia, and governments forming a global ecosystem to deliver vaccines at unprecedented speed.

These companies did not win through competition alone. They won by creating ecosystems where they controlled the platform but empowered others to innovate on top of it.

The Strategic Advantages of Collaboration

Why are ecosystems so powerful? Because they allow companies to achieve what is impossible alone.

Faster Innovation: Collaboration brings fresh thinking, diverse perspectives, and specialized expertise. Instead of building everything internally—which is slow and expensive—companies tap into the best available capabilities across the network.

Shared Risk: Large-scale innovation, especially in pharmaceuticals, biotech, energy, and AI, carries enormous risk. Partnerships allow companies to share investment, share failure, and accelerate breakthroughs without bearing all costs alone.

Expanded Market Reach: Through ecosystems, companies reach new geographies, new customer segments, new channels, and new services. A smaller partner may bring local expertise; a larger one may bring distribution power. Together, they unlock new value.

Faster Scaling: Platforms and ecosystems allow exponential scaling. For example, Apple didn’t build millions of apps; developers did. Uber and Airbnb didn’t buy assets; hosts and drivers provided them. Amazon didn’t stock every product; its sellers created the inventory. Scaling is no longer limited by internal capacity; it is amplified by the network.

Increased Resilience: Companies with ecosystems are more adaptive. If one partner fails, the network can reconfigure. Ecosystems are like biological systems, they evolve, diversify, and strengthen through collaboration.

New Management Skills for an Ecosystem World

Thriving in an ecosystem-driven economy requires a new mindset and new leadership capabilities.

Coordination: Leaders must learn to coordinate multiple partners with different incentives. They must provide structure without suffocating innovation.

Trust Building: Ecosystems run on trust; trust in data sharing, joint ventures, shared intellectual property, and aligned goals. Companies must become transparent, ethical, and reliable partners.

Co-Creation: Instead of dictating terms, leaders must learn to co-design solutions with partners, customers, regulators, and communities.

Platform Thinking: This means designing products and services that others can build upon. Think APIs, modular technologies, open architectures, and developer ecosystems.

Collaboration Culture: Internally, companies must break silos, encourage knowledge-sharing, and promote a “win together” mindset, not a “protect my turf” mentality.

Examples of the Collaboration Shift Across Industries

Technology

Open-source development has become a dominant model. Companies like Microsoft and Google actively contribute to open-source projects—even while competing.

Pharmaceuticals

Co-development, shared research platforms, contract manufacturing organizations, AI-enabled discovery partnerships—pharma now thrives through collaboration.

Automotive

Automakers partner with battery manufacturers, software companies, energy firms, mobility services, and autonomous vehicle startups. The car is now part of a mobility ecosystem.

Finance

Banks collaborate with fintech startups via open banking APIs. Aggregators, wallets, and embedded finance create new ecosystems of value.

Healthcare

Hospitals, insurers, pharma firms, diagnostics labs, and telehealth startups collaborate to deliver integrated patient journeys.

What This Shift Means for Companies

Organizations that embrace ecosystems will innovate faster, reduce costs, access new markets, attract top talent, deliver superior customer experiences, become more resilient, and build defensible competitive advantages based on networks, not assets. 

Organizations that insist on going it alone will increasingly find themselves outpaced, out-innovated, and isolated.

What This Shift Means for Leaders and Professionals

Leaders must adopt a partnership mindset, humility to share credit, the discipline to build trust, the courage to be transparent, and the creativity to co-design new value.

Professionals must learn cross-functional collaboration, open innovation, stakeholder management, ecosystem navigation, and partnership-driven problem solving. 

Collaboration is now as important a skill as technical expertise.

Sum Up

The future of business belongs to ecosystem players, not solitary competitors. The companies that win will be the ones that understand a fundamental truth of the modern economy:

You cannot win by fighting alone. You win by building networks where everyone grows stronger together.

Concluded.

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For most blogs, I research from several sources which are open to public. Their links are mentioned under references. There is no intent to infringe upon anyone’s copyrights. If, any claim is lodged, it will be acknowledged and duly recognized immediately.