Page 71 - Harvard Business Review, Sep/Oct 2018

Alibaba and the Future 9
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of Business

our disjointed observations and ideas Alibaba’s special innovation, we realized, was that we were truly building an
about e-commerce trends began to coalesce ecosystem: a community of organisms (businesses and consumers of many types)
into a larger view of the future, and by interacting with one another and the environment (the online platform and the larger
the end, we had agreed on a vision. We off-line physical elements). Our strategic imperative was to make sure that the platform
would “foster the development of an open, provided all the resources, or access to the resources, that an online business would
coordinated, prosperous e- commerce need to succeed, and hence supported the evolution of the ecosystem.
ecosystem.” That’s when Alibaba’s journey The ecosystem we built was simple at first: We linked buyers and sellers of goods. As
really began. technology advanced, more business functions moved online—including established