McKinsey's Ecosystem 2.0: Climbing to the next level summarizes ecosystem 2.0 as:
In the emerging world of Ecosystem 2.0, data are the holy grail, the breakdown of sector borders is a given, and successful players try to lock in control points to expand horizontally and vertically across the grid.
The article chart below (click to enlarge), which shows the 7 largest companies in the world by market capitalization, really jumped out at us.
The reason is small businesses and independent workers are important business partners for all 6 ecosystem companies. They are also important end customers for these firms.
The ecosystem roles small businesses and independent workers play varies across the 6 companies.
Examples include using their marketplaces to sell their products and services (Amazon and Alibaba marketplaces; Apple and Google's App stores), acting as value added resellers (Microsoft and Apple) and providing value added services (marketing help for those using Facebook and Alphabet's ad and marketing services).
And in most cases, SMBs and independent workers are integrated into the ecosystems of these companies in multiple ways.
There's also a large and growing number of other ecosystem companies that are reliant of SMBs and independent worker business partners. This includes well known marketplace firms like Uber, Etsy and Upwork as well as firms like Schwab, who has thousands of small and solopreneur wealth managers as part of their ecosystem.
In fact, there are ecosystem companies in almost every industry and most have SMBs and independent workers as important ecosystem partners.
The rise of ecosystem companies is one of the drivers behind the shift to barbell industry structures.
These industry structures consist of a relatively few giant corporations on one end, a narrow middle consisting of a shrinking number of mid-sized firms, and a large and growing number of small, micro and one person (solopreneur) firms on the other end.
See our Industry Structure section for more on this topic.
