The Investment Strategy
THE INVESTMENT STRATEGY
Back the firms organising the economics of their ecosystem.
EcosystemEconomics® is an investment strategy before it is anything else. It selects for one characteristic: whether a company is setting the terms on which its whole industry makes money, or living by terms someone else set.
Optimise for the system-level win.
- Julie Meyer.
WHERE THE VALUE SITS
Three layers, and only one of them compounds.
Every industry now sorts into the same three layers. The layer a company occupies determines what it earns, and whether its earnings grow with scale or erode with it.
DAVID
APPLICATIONS
High-growth enabling technology firms. Network-native, lean, and built to improve as more participants join.
Takes the revenue, and the profits that follow it.
PLATFORMS
The layer that organises the market rather than competing in it. It sets the rules, sees every transaction, and keeps the data.
Captures value from both layers above and below.
GOLIATH
INFRASTRUCTURE
Heavily regulated, low margin, capital hungry — and carrying investment that others build on without contributing to it.
Makes the investments, and books them as costs.
DIGITAL ENABLERS
PLATFORM
OWNERS
INCUMBENTS
The strategy is not to pick a layer. It is to move a company up one.
THE CENTRAL MOVE
David and Goliath must dance.
What the David brings
The technology that makes an ecosystem possible, the business model that shares its economics, and a network whose value rises with every participant added. What it lacks is customers.
What the Goliath brings
Customers, distribution, scale, reach, regulatory standing and balance sheet. What it lacks is a business model that compounds.
Neither side wins alone, and the partnership is not charity in either direction. The Goliath that runs pilots with Digital Enablers builds a Digital P&L™ — a modelled view of what the new economics do to its own numbers over the medium term — before it commits. The David reaches a customer base it could not have bought.
The question that starts the work is deliberately simple: in whose interest is it for you to win? Those are your Natural Allies. Adjacent companies, former competitors, and anyone holding a piece of a transaction you cannot complete alone. With them, you construct the business model.
HOW THE STRATEGY IS EXECUTED
Five stages, in order.
The sequence matters. Most capital fails because it starts at stage three.
01. Strategy. Read the industry as an ecosystem and establish how it should work, not how it currently does.
02. Structuring. Build the vehicle and the economics that let every necessary party participate.
03. Sourcing. Find the Digital Enablers already organising the economics of the target ecosystem.
04. Distribution. Connect them to the Goliaths whose customers and reach turn a network into a market.
05. Marketing. Make the position public, so that capital and counterparties come to you.
WHAT ARE WE UNDERWRITING
Network Asset Value
Traditional accounting was built to value factories. It struggles with what a network business actually owns: its data, its business model, and the community that keeps returning to it. That gap is where the mispricing lives, and it is what the strategy underwrites.
Network Asset Value measures four things — connectivity potential, data generation, scalability of the ecosystem, and the routes by which it can be monetised — and triangulates them against cost, income and market approaches. It is the discipline behind every position taken.
WHERE IS IT APPLIED
Target ecosystems.
FINANCE
ENERGY
HEALTH
TRANSPORTATION
COMMERCE
TRAVEL
SMART HOME
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
SPACE