Achieving successful ecosystems requires participants to work together to create mutual benefit for all members. But finding and collaborating with partners is often easier said than done. Typical stumbling blocks include lack of clarity on goals, vision and opportunities, and the massive effort required to agree and define capabilities.

Phase 1 of the Catalyst, called Ecosystem Playbook, demonstrated how communications service providers (CSPs) could visualize an ecosystem, model the potential opportunities and then identify the business capabilities necessary to exploit them.

In Ecosystem Playbook Phase 2, we’ve extended the scope of the Playbook to focus on the Ecosystem Partners and the business capabilities a CSP must have in place to establish and maintain a successful Partner Ecosystem.

This extension focuses on business capabilities covering ecosystem strategy, partner onboarding and self service and on creating an implementable roadmap with the help of CurateFx.

For these reasons, we’ve built on the Capability model described in Phase 1 to define an Ecosystem Partner ‘Capability Map’.

The map identifies the business capabilities that will typically be required from:

• A strategic perspective
• An operational perspective
• And an on-boarding perspective

This Catalyst is business, as opposed to technology, focused but we nonetheless plan to construct a prototype on-boarding portal which can demonstrate how the concepts explored in the project may be put into use in the real world.