Business Ecosystem Design · Agentic AI · Growth
AI agents create value only when they can act across partners: data, payment, logistics, service. That is an ecosystem. Michael Lewrick has written about the minimum viable ecosystem (MVE) since 2018 and wrote the book on business ecosystem design. He helps leadership teams design ecosystems in which companies, partners and AI agents deliver what no single company can.
Industry boundaries are dissolving. Value no longer comes from one company’s product but from the system around the customer.
Europe is good at products, pilots and partnerships on paper. China’s leading platforms build ecosystems: one customer relationship, many actors, shared data, payment and logistics, and now AI agents that complete tasks across all of them.
The result is a different kind of growth. Linear growth comes from one business model plus some partners. Exponential growth comes from a network of actors whose business models reinforce each other. With agentic AI the gap widens: an agent can only book, buy or solve a problem if the services behind it are connected.
Agentic AI does not replace ecosystem design. It makes it urgent.
Design thinking finds the right problem. Lean start-up proves the product. Business ecosystem design adds the step most companies miss: the fit between the system and its actors.
A minimum viable ecosystem (MVE) is the first working version of a business ecosystem in its most efficient form. It has at least one actor for each market role it needs, a value proposition the actors shape together, and value streams from which every actor benefits. Like an MVP, it is built to learn fast, and it grows from there.
Source: Michael Lewrick, Design Thinking for Business Growth (Wiley) and changement! 08/2021.
Over the past 20 years, Michael Lewrick’s frameworks have strongly influenced Chinese companies (including Tencent, Alibaba, Ant Group and Ping An): first with design thinking, later with business ecosystem design and the MVE. They gave these companies the frameworks to build scalable business models. Today the leading platforms are adding AI agents to their ecosystems. Three examples from Michael Lewrick’s keynote The Future of Commerce (Zurich, October 2026):
Tencent · WeChat
More than 1.4 billion monthly users message, pay, book and shop without leaving WeChat. Since 2026 an AI assistant opens brands’ mini-programs on the user’s behalf, and since June 2026 agents can pay with WeChat Pay once the user approves. Search, service, sale and payment happen in one conversation.
ByteDance
A recommendation engine powers Douyin, Doubao, Toutiao and more. Creators bring content, users attention, brands ad spend, merchants products. Every interaction trains the engine, and the loop gets stronger with each turn.
JD.com
AI forecasts demand per product and region and moves stock to front distribution centres near customers. A published study reports USD 22.3 million in annual transfer-cost savings. With Joybuy and its offer for MediaMarkt and Saturn, JD brings this model to Europe.
When agents shop for consumers, the winners are the brands and ecosystems that agents can find, understand, trust and transact with.
Sources: WeChat team via Beijing Daily (21 Jun 2026); WeChat Developer Platform; Qi et al., INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics; Lewrick & Company (2026).
Ecosystem questions
Every ecosystem starts with a good question. Use these as a starting point for your leadership team.
01Banking
How might we become the trusted hub for a customer’s home purchase, from search and financing to moving in, together with real estate, insurance and utilities partners?
02Insurance
How might we move from paying claims to preventing them, with partners who keep homes, cars and people healthy?
03Healthcare and life sciences
How might we connect patients, physicians, pharmacies and payers so that a therapy works better in everyday life, not only in the study?
04Retail and e-commerce
How might we make our products findable, understandable and buyable for AI agents that shop on behalf of our customers?
05Mobility
How might we offer door-to-door journeys across rail, bus, car sharing and bikes with one booking and one bill?
06Energy and utilities
How might we help households and SMEs produce, store and share energy as part of a local energy community?
07Manufacturing
How might we sell outcomes such as uptime or output instead of machines, together with service, data and financing partners?
08Tourism and hospitality
How might we turn a region into one seamless guest experience, from arrival to the last evening, across hotels, transport and activities?
09Public sector
How might we let citizens and companies complete a life event, such as founding a company, in one step instead of ten offices?
10Telecommunications
How might we use our connectivity and customer access to orchestrate a smart-home or SME ecosystem instead of selling data plans?
More than 50 tools and canvases from the book guide teams from strategy to scale. Four canvases form the backbone:
Why business ecosystems decide the next decade of growth, what China gets right, and what it means for your industry.
Your leadership team works on a real ecosystem question with the canvases from the book and leaves with a first MVE design.
For teams who will design and run ecosystems: the bootcamp with the Drucker School’s Center for the Future of Organization or in-house programmes for corporate teams.
Strategy, actor mapping, value streams, governance and data, and the design of agentic services across partners.
Expert at the Drucker School
At the Center for the Future of Organization (CFFO) of the Drucker School of Management, Claremont Graduate University, Michael Lewrick leads the Business Ecosystem Design Bootcamp, based on his book Design Thinking for Business Growth.
“The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different.” Peter F. Drucker
The bootcamp at the CFFO →Michael Lewrick introduced the minimum viable ecosystem to practitioners in 2018 and has shaped business ecosystem design as a discipline that expands design thinking.
His book hits the zeitgeist and is the best definition of business ecosystem design I have read so far.
Many people have talked about the design of business ecosystems. This book depicts impressively how to approach it.
The capability of designing business ecosystems will become one of the key skills for companies in the next decade.
The book
How to Design and Scale Business Models and Business Ecosystems
The practical guide to business ecosystem design: the problem-to-growth-and-scale framework, design lenses, the MVE, more than 50 tools, and international examples from Tencent and Ant to Ping An, DBS and Amazon.
Translated into more than 15 languages, including German, English, Chinese, Japanese, French and Indonesian.
Michael Lewrick is a bestselling author, keynote speaker and advisor on innovation, AI and business ecosystems. His Wiley design thinking series has reached more than three million readers in over 25 languages. As former Chief Innovation Officer at Swisscom, he brought ecosystem thinking into practice long before the term was common. Today he advises executive teams through Lewrick & Company in Vaduz, Liechtenstein.
More about Michael →Business ecosystem design is the deliberate design of a network of companies and other actors that together deliver a value proposition no single company could offer alone. It expands design thinking from the customer and the product to the whole system: actors, roles, value streams, business models and governance.
A minimum viable ecosystem is the first working version of a business ecosystem in its most efficient form. It includes at least one actor for each necessary market role, a jointly shaped value proposition and value streams that benefit every actor. Like a minimum viable product, it is designed to learn fast and grow step by step.
An MVP tests whether a product solves a customer problem (product/market fit). An MVE tests whether the right actors can deliver a value proposition together and all benefit from it (system/actors fit). Many ecosystem initiatives fail because they skip this second fit.
An AI agent creates value by completing tasks such as booking, buying or solving a problem. To do so, it must act across services from different providers: data, payment, logistics and service. Only an ecosystem connects these services. That is why Chinese platforms such as WeChat combine ecosystems and agents, and why ecosystem design becomes urgent with agentic AI.
Chinese platforms build vertical use cases into existing ecosystems, scale them fast and measure success in cost and revenue. European companies can learn to design around one customer relationship, open their services to partners and agents, and start with a minimum viable ecosystem instead of a large plan.
Dr. Michael Lewrick is the author of Design Thinking for Business Growth (Wiley), Business Ökosystem Design (Vahlen) and the bestselling Wiley design thinking series. He has written about the minimum viable ecosystem since 2018, led the business ecosystem design bootcamp at the Drucker School’s Center for the Future of Organization and advises companies through Lewrick & Company in Vaduz, Liechtenstein.
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