Skip to main content

Harvesting

warning

This is an early draft and isn't yet up to our standard. You can contribute improvements.

Harvesting lets you scale innovation without bearing the cost of exploration. The trick is to expose a platform or ecosystem, encourage third-party development, and then watch which offerings gain traction. Once demand is clear, you can acquire, replicate, or integrate.

This must be done delicately: if harvesting looks extractive or predatory, others will avoid your ecosystem. Done right, it creates a reinforcing loop: the more people build on your platform, the more options you get to harvest.

Think of Amazon’s strategy around AWS primitives and how new services emerge from customer usage patterns.

How do you avoid poisoning your ecosystem’s trust post-harvest? Signal management is key.

  • Sensing Engines (Ecosystem): Mechanism to detect what’s working in the ecosystem before harvesting.
  • Open Approaches (Accelerators): Needed to attract ecosystem players willing to build on your platform.
  • Co-creation (Ecosystem): Early signal for what to harvest later.
  • Co-opting (Ecosystem): You may harvest what others tried to use as differentiation.
  • Sweat & Dump (Dealing with toxicity): Harvesting may generate legacy you later offload.