Michael G Jacobides
Industry boundaries are moving faster than strategy teams can redraw them. Software firms, platforms and AI entrants now compete inside sectors that once felt structurally protected, and the rules of value capture have changed with them. Boards keep asking the same question: where in this ecosystem do we still own the customer, and where are we becoming a component in someone else’s stack.
Michael G Jacobides is a London Business School professor and Thinkers50-ranked strategist who helps boards and executive teams work out how to compete and capture value as AI and digital platforms collapse the boundaries between industries.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Michael G Jacobides
- He is the academic most directly associated with ecosystem strategy as a formal discipline. His Strategic Management Journal paper “Towards a Theory of Ecosystems” is one of the most-read articles the journal has published, and is the reference point others build on.
- He gives leadership teams a working language for a question they keep asking badly. Are we an orchestrator, a complementor, or a component, and what does each role earn under AI.
- His policy work gives the room a regulatory lens most strategy speakers cannot offer. He served as Chief Expert Advisor on the Digital Economy to the Hellenic Competition Commission and contributes to the World Economic Forum’s AI Governance Alliance.
- He has been ranked on the Thinkers50 list of the world’s top 50 management thinkers in four consecutive cycles since 2019, which is the credential boards recognise without needing to be briefed.
- His advisory base, BCG Henderson Institute and Evolution Ltd, keeps the content tested against live corporate decisions rather than against the conference circuit.
Biography highlights
- Sir Donald Gordon Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation and Professor of Strategy, London Business School.
- Thinkers50 ranked management thinker in 2019, 2021, 2023 and 2025; Strategy Award shortlist, 2019.
- Co-Editor, Industrial and Corporate Change. Author of “Towards a Theory of Ecosystems” (Strategic Management Journal) and “How to Compete When Industries Digitize and Collide” (California Management Review, article-of-the-year).
- Academic Advisor to the BCG Henderson Institute; Lead Advisor of Evolution Ltd; contributor to the World Economic Forum’s AI Governance Alliance.
- Former Chief Expert Advisor on the Digital Economy, Hellenic Competition Commission. Visiting Scholar, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
- Regular contributor to Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Financial Times and Forbes; commentator for BBC and CNN.
Biography
The boundary between industries is no longer the boundary between competitors. A bank now competes with a phone, a car company with a software platform, a retailer with an ad network. Jacobides has spent two decades building the academic framework that explains this, and turning it into language strategy teams can use.
His paper “Towards a Theory of Ecosystems” in the Strategic Management Journal is the reference point most other ecosystem writing now builds on. The follow-up in California Management Review, on competing as industries digitise and collide, won the journal’s article-of-the-year and is widely used inside corporate strategy functions. The work is academic in origin and operational in use.
That dual register is the reason boards book him. He holds the Sir Donald Gordon Chair at London Business School, co-edits Industrial and Corporate Change, and has been ranked on the Thinkers50 list of the world’s top management thinkers across four cycles. He also advises the BCG Henderson Institute, leads the advisory boutique Evolution Ltd, and contributes to the World Economic Forum’s AI Governance Alliance. His former role as Chief Expert Advisor on the Digital Economy to the Hellenic Competition Commission means he reads platform and AI regulation as a participant, not a spectator.
What a senior buyer gets in the room is a strategist who can take an executive team from “AI is reshaping our industry” to a specific decision about where in the new value architecture the firm should sit, what it should orchestrate, what it should cede, and what regulators will let it own.
Key speaking topics
- Ecosystem strategy and value migration
- Generative AI and competitive advantage
- Digital platforms and industry convergence
- Orchestrator, complementor and component positioning
- AI governance and competition policy
- Business model reinvention under digital disruption
- Boardroom strategy in technology-driven industries
Ideal for
- Boards and group executive committees redrawing strategy as AI and platforms reshape their industry
- Chief Strategy Officers, Chief Digital Officers and Heads of Corporate Development assessing ecosystem positioning
- Banking, telecommunications, FMCG, healthcare and industrial leadership teams facing convergence pressure
- Private equity and investor audiences pricing platform exposure and ecosystem risk
Audience outcomes
- A working vocabulary for ecosystem roles: orchestrator, complementor, component, and what each earns
- A clearer view of where AI shifts value inside the audience’s specific industry, not in general
- A framework for testing current strategy against the way industry boundaries are actually moving
- Sharper questions for the next board strategy session on platform exposure and regulatory risk
- A read on how competition policy and AI governance will constrain the playing field
Talks
A working framework for leadership teams whose industries are being reshaped by AI, platforms and digital entrants, with a focus on where value now sits and who captures it.
Key takeaways:
- How to read an industry as an ecosystem rather than a sector, and what changes when you do
- The three positions firms can occupy in a digital ecosystem, and the economics of each
- Where AI is most likely to redraw the value architecture next, and what that means for incumbents
A senior-audience read on how generative AI changes the basis of competition inside established industries, drawing on Jacobides’s research, BCG Henderson Institute work and WEF AI Governance Alliance contributions.
Key takeaways:
- Which advantages generative AI erodes fastest, and which it strengthens
- How to distinguish AI productivity gains from genuine strategic repositioning
- What boards should be asking management about AI exposure, governance and capital allocation
Built on his Harvard Business Review work, this talk addresses how leadership teams should recalibrate strategy when capital is more expensive, growth is harder, and ecosystem dynamics still apply.
Key takeaways:
- How tighter capital changes ecosystem economics, not only firm-level economics
- Where to defend, where to retrench, and where to keep investing through the cycle
- How to test the current strategic plan against the way the industry is actually moving