This case explores how Alibaba Group has nurtured the creation of a business ecosystem to underpin the success of its Taobao Marketplace and Tmall.com e-commerce businesses that have come to dominate on-line shopping in China. The actions Alibaba took to catalyse and shape the development of its business ecosystem and to encourage investment and innovation by partners to make the ecosystem more successful are highlighted.

These included making space for partners by abandoning important early profit streams and focusing Alibaba’s role on enabling the ecosystem rather than acting as an intermediary, promoting efficient interfaces between partners, breaking down barriers to joining the Taobao.com and Tmall.com ecosystems to encourage recruitment participants and rapid growth. It shows how, by focusing on improving the ecosystem’s scale, vitality and speed of innovation, Alibaba successfully creates the potential for new profit streams both for itself and its partners.

Read here