Mapping the Firm’s Ecosystem for Strategic Advantage

Discover how mapping your ecosystem can reveal new cross-sector innovation opportunities and a knowledge graph can help you stretch to meet them

We often use capability mapping inside organisations to identify hotspots of new ways of working or emerging digital capabilities, and also to align transformation or skills development with strategic needs. Sometimes, though, it's useful to zoom out even further. Not just to see the organisation’s capabilities, but also the broader ecosystem it inhabits: the adjacent sectors, client needs, and emerging opportunities that sit just beyond the firm’s current line of sight.

As we wrote last week, professional and financial services are good example of the need for this wider view, since they are no longer entirely discrete, neatly delineated sectors. They have a lot of overlap in terms of both what they do (e.g. law, accounting, consulting, finance, insurance) and also how they work. And above all, these inter-connected sectors are all becoming algorithmic, and therefore potentially programmable:

“Law, accounting rules, underwriting algorithms and financial regulations are all essentially forms of human software… programmable, and therefore highly amenable to the kind of agentic AI that is coming into focus right now.”

This reframing invites a new way to think about service innovation. Clients don’t experience their needs as discrete services that sit within a well-understood professional silo. They experience cases, complex, messy situations that cut across legal, financial, regulatory, and operational domains. Yet professional services firms still mostly build, market, and deliver their services from within the boundaries of their own sector.

This is not just a structural mismatch — it’s a growth constraint. When firms can’t see beyond their own ‘stack’, they miss the opportunity to respond to what clients actually need, and the opportunity to move into adjacent spaces, recombine capabilities, or partner more intelligently across the ecosystem.

Why Mapping Your Ecosystem Matters

Most firms know their internal capabilities. Fewer have a clear view of what exists just beyond their borders, in closely related fields.

But when you start to map the wider ecosystem, patterns emerge. A compliance firm may find its decision logic mirrors those used in legal tech. An accounting firm might discover overlaps with risk models in fintech. A law firm might recognise that the smart contracts it’s beginning to draft are informed by precedents, but enforced by code, regulation, and financial instruments from other sectors.

These overlaps can be opportunity signals.

Ecosystem capability mapping is one way to make those signals visible. It helps firms identify reusable patterns, missing building blocks, and modular capabilities already in the market. And with a clearer view of what’s out there — whether offered by peers, startups, or direct-to-consumer products — firms can choose to copy, adopt, partner with, or build new combinations from what they find.

Mapping enhances strategic visibility — the kind that helps you move faster, stretch further, and build smarter, without always starting from scratch.

Let’s look at some specific techniques to help firms evolve this new, innovation-driven approach to future-focused products and services, using professional and financial services as an example.

Technique 1: Using an Ecosystem Capability Canvas

The first step in reframing how your firm grows is to surface what already exists, both inside and beyond your walls.

That’s where an Ecosystem Capability Canvas comes in. It’s a simple technique that helps you map your current strengths against the wider patterns of capability emerging in your sector and adjacent domains. You’re aiming to uncover new opportunities for reuse, recombination, and crossover.

Example Ecosystem Capability Map, but there are many other options.

Start by plotting your firm’s core capabilities and customer-facing services — the parts of your offer that interact directly with the market.

Then, map these against capabilities used in nearby domains:

• What do law firms, fintechs, regtech platforms, or insurtech startups offer that resembles your own stack?

• Where do your decision engines mirror those in other areas?

• What’s already being done in a direct-to-consumer product that your clients are asking about?

You’re not just looking for competitors. You’re looking for adjacent models, modular building blocks, or emerging approaches that can be borrowed, integrated, extended, or simply partnered with.

Then think about capability gaps or unmet customer needs in the sector ecosystems, especially those that sit at the boundaries between sectors, and consider if you could extend your capabilities to address them.

As always with capability mapping, we want to take an outside-in view — what is needed in the market that we could build? — and also an inside-out view — what more can we do with what we already have?

In this example canvas, fintech and insurtech on the left tend to have a more B2C focus than accounting and legaltech on the right side, which tend to be more B2B focused. And of course, outside the firms in each sector, there is a plethora of startups, new online products or even funded initiatives that are offering new capabilities in these areas, whether B2B or B2C.

In many cases, you’ll find that firms across legal, accounting, finance, and insurance are already using similar primitives:

• Structured workflows for document review or onboarding

• Embedded rules engines for eligibility or compliance

• Semantic tagging of decisions, risks, or obligations

• Generative tools for contracts, reports, or advice

The difference is in how they’re packaged and where they’re pointed. What’s stopping a legal firm from operating in risk tech? Or a fintech from offering advisory? Often, just a few missing capabilities that might already exist in the ecosystem.

Mapping these overlaps gives your firm a clearer view of the “composability surface” of the ecosystem:

• Which capabilities can be borrowed or adapted?

• Which are duplicated across firms or sectors?

• Which are absent, but buildable with the right partners or inputs?

It also helps you think more clearly about your own shape. What do you offer that others might want to plug into? What’s distinctive, what’s generic, and what could be combined in new ways?

Use this canvas as a way to sense the landscape, not to control it. You don’t need industry-wide deep knowledge. You just need firm-level visibility.

In the next section, we’ll explore how you can take this external view and bring it into your internal reasoning, using knowledge graphs to model and respond to real-world complexity.