But the six founders of EventuSix, led by Reg Simpson, are hoping to change that.
The company is an innovator in business environment insight, and is bringing to market new approaches and tools top management teams require to better understand business ecosystems. EventuSix has prepared an aggressive growth plan based on satisfying the global demand for state-of-the-art visualization tools and processes that help management teams produce a shared view of their ecosystems, and shape it to the company's advantage.
Understanding business ecosystems is core to our region's success in the creative economy. This provides local companies with new, global business opportunities, as in the case of EventuSix. I'm calling on our community leaders to help local creative companies exploit these opportunities.
Today, a company's business ecosystem is hard to conventionally visualize and much harder to shape in a firm's favour. But to grow a company and reduce its business risk, its management team needs to figure out the best way to leverage the ecosystem in which the company is a player.
Selecting the best strategies to capitalize on an ecosystem is a difficult task, for at least three reasons:
- First, we live in an era where the number and diversity of players in an ecosystem is large. Even larger is the number of ways incumbent and emerging players can concurrently co-operate and compete.
- Second, there are multiple and often conflicting perspectives of whom the relevant players in an ecosystem are and how they connect. Manual drawings of players using whiteboards or spreadsheets are impractical and provide limited value. Frequently, critical issues are left unresolved or undiscovered and the environment is only partially represented.
- Third, companies operate in a fast-moving and uncertain environment where decisions are often made based on incomplete information and misinformation. Frequently, many founders of technology companies operate in a fog.
The current tools on offer don't provide any kind of systematic assistance for management seeking to understand their environment. And that's where EventuSix comes in.
The firm, which has partnered with Carleton University researchers, offers a unique approach for growth-oriented companies – the company is developing a process and software visualization tool to enable the mapping of complex business environments.
The process and visualization tool will be hosted online, to enable interactive building and analysis of ecosystems.
This allows customers to produce a shared view of their business environment, and produce a "to do list" to make changes to the environment in which they operate. Support, workshops and templates are provided throughout the process to achieve timely and high-quality results.
The methodology is anchored around three functions: "map," "shape" and "profit." The map function provides a visual map of customers, collaborators, competitors. Embedded behind the map is a comprehensive setup of data elements characterizing both company and inter-company interactions.
The shape function is a strategic data discovery playground, where users perform a range of static data analysis, plus "what-if" simulations based on game theory. Static analysis includes ecosystem health, company and inter-company analysis, financial risk, market segmentation and technology analysis in a user-selectable presentation format.
The profit function is about plan implementation – the steps needed to implement the "to-do list" from the shape function are spelled out in a prioritized list.
EventuSix is a great example of a local company solving a real problem and capitalizing on the creation of business ecosystems at the same time. The only question is, who will be next?
