Digital ecosystems represent a major opportunity for French SMEs to position themselves strategically in tomorrow's economy.
Published on 2025-06-10 by Nathalie Lamborghini Dumas.
Digital ecosystems have enabled the emergence of new business models: an unprecedented opportunity for growth and competitiveness for SMEs.
France possesses significant and virtually untapped economic potential in digital ecosystems. French small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have all the cards in hand to benefit from this new economy and develop significantly.
Digital ecosystems are indeed characterized by a multitude of actors and interactions, thus offering French SMEs numerous business opportunities.
Thus, French SMEs have every interest in positioning themselves in this booming economy and seizing the opportunities available to them.
To do so, however, it is necessary to thoroughly understand the challenges of digital ecosystems, and to be ready to rethink the very foundations of how we have always done business.
Digitalized commercial ecosystems (or digital ecosystems) have become essential in recent years, but they remain very poorly understood; moreover, they are wrongly considered as the preserve of startups or digital giants.
Thanks to growing connectivity, cloud adoption, data production, and the advent of platforms, companies can now exploit resources outside their organizational boundaries (including those of their competitors) to create and provide solutions, capture or create new markets. They thus move from a participant (or producer) role in an ecosystem to an orchestrator role: from the linear economy to the collaborative economy (or network economies).
This digital ecosystem economy is not a detail: according to the WEF, 30% of global revenues will be generated by platform businesses by 2025.
Nor is it an inevitable danger, but a tremendous opportunity to leverage the capabilities and assets of our SMEs, to innovate and remain competitive in Europe. Whether in B2B, B2C, G2C, etc.
Yet everything remains to be done in Europe, particularly on impact digital ecosystems: the USA, Asia and Fintech currently dominate the platform economy globally.
The good news is that this is not inevitable, and on the contrary, there is still time to join the race.
Digital platforms are not models reserved for technology or digital companies, quite the contrary.
But you need to understand their very particular mechanisms well, and avoid the shortcuts and amalgamations that this new economy suffers from: indeed, who isn't currently talking about platforms or ecosystems, marketplaces, e-commerce or SaaS? All these terms being used interchangeably, incorrectly.
Reason 1: mechanisms
Digital ecosystems function very differently from the linear models we know. A platform business orchestrating a digital ecosystem can create value on 4 levels: the more it works these different levels, the more competitive and difficult to copy it will be, and the more value flows it will have to monetize.
The examples above are B2C examples for easy understanding, but the 4-layer theory is absolutely identical for B2B, or any other type of platform.
Working all 4 value creation layers thus increases the resilience, competitiveness, business potential and growth of a platform business.
However, 94% of European platform businesses only work on one or two, most often the Marketplace or SaaS (Research conducted in Europe on 200+ platforms by FastbreakOne in 2021). This is not only insufficient but makes them susceptible to competition; it is also generally difficult to derive a Return on Investment, as the "connections - marketplace" layer alone is often difficult to monetize.
Yet, SMEs have immense and underutilized assets in the platform economy. These assets could serve the "data" and "infrastructure" layers: a considerable advantage in this platform economy. And I mean "assets" in the broadest sense: whether human, physical, financial, real estate, IT, etc.
Reason 2: nature of SMEs
The second reason that places SMEs ahead of large groups and startups in terms of opportunities in this ecosystem economy is their very nature:
Quick glossary
Conclusion: barriers we impose on ourselves
Beyond the many interpretation errors on the terms, SMEs think they must completely redefine their business domain, and this is not true: we are not talking about digital transformation here, but about entrepreneurship to accelerate and protect the historic activity, and to boost growth.
Indeed, it is about increasing (or creating) a share of revenue based on transactions : in parallel and complementary to that based on product or service sales.
Furthermore, most of the time SMEs compare platform creation to product line creation: yet it is very different, and much closer to creating a new company, intended to collaborate with the historic business. The goal is to create a new business model alongside the existing business model, in synergy and acceleration of the historic one.
Let's take the example of the SME Hagedorn in Germany in the construction sector: in 2006, Mr. Hagedorn founded the family SME Gütersloher Wertstoffzentrum GmbH which recycles construction rubble, then Erdbau- und -erschließungs GmbH for civil engineering in October 2011. In 2013, Revital GmbH focused on brownfield restructuring. In 2016, the Hagedorn group launched an online platform Brownfield24, connecting sellers and buyers of industrial and commercial brownfields. Then another platform called Schüttflix was founded in 2019: thanks to their operational market knowledge, they created a quality service enabling delivery of materials to the right site, at the right place, at the right time, in the right condition. Today, the Hagedorn group is a company with over 500 employees and €232M in revenue. It relies on both linear business models and platform models: a so-called "ambidextrous" company.
In conclusion, Europe has very strong cards to play in this new digital ecosystem economy thanks to the assets and entrepreneurial culture of its fabric of 22.6 million SMEs: a tremendous opportunity to innovate and profit from this new economy, but also an opportunity to support and strengthen European SMEs.