Systems leadership and growth

What leadership is required to create value in technology-driven ecosystems? Technology is transforming how companies create value. This PhD project explores the leadership needed in platform-driven ecosystems, focusing on how leaders can harness complexity to create new value. Through interviews and data analysis, the research will provide practical insights for leaders, making this work not just theoretical but actionable for leaders across industries.

Big Shifts are changing society: Digitization, global connectivity, eroding barriers of access to resources, increase in consumer power, consumer preference shifting from products to services and the rise of a platform economy. Together, these shifts are changing the way companies create and capture value. The operating model of scaling efficiency becomes increasingly outdated, as we are moving towards a world where scaling learning becomes the imperative. Companies with traditional strategies aimed at driving efficiency at scale may produce diminishing returns or miss the mark. What is required from leaders under the new conditions? How do leaders understand their own role as an agent in a complex system? We are only beginning to uncover the potential of platform leadership. Gaining new knowledge about this field will require obtaining tacit knowledge from people with personal experience from the field. In addition to theories from management, organization and strategy, we will need to use frameworks from the complexity sciences as well as behavioral science.