Foundational Learning Component
The foundational learning component for the SEE-ME program is the “Markets and Service Ecosystems” course led by Professor Irene Ng with the University of Warwick team
10 Hours | Five Sessions of Two Hours Each
The foundational learning component of SEE-ME is delivered as a 10-hour intensive, structured into five two-hour sessions. Its purpose is to establish a shared conceptual foundation and design language across the cohort, enabling participants from different disciplines to engage productively in ecosystem and market design work.
Rather than focusing on tools or techniques, the sessions build progressively from first principles—how value is created and exchanged—toward an integrated understanding of how modern economies are organized and coordinated. Each session introduces core concepts that are revisited and applied during the subsequent studio-based design phase.
Session 1: Transactions, Value, and Exchange
Session 1 introduces the foundations of markets through capability, value, and exchange. Participants distinguish between value—created in context and realised in use—and worth, the monetary assessment settled in transactions. The session reframes products as boundary objects that shape transaction conditions and examines product–market fit as alignment between product affordances, market structure, and viable exchange. Through historical and technological shifts, participants see how markets evolve when transaction boundaries change and when value creation and worth capture decouple.
Session 2: Organizing Exchange — Firms and Platforms
Building on the foundations of transactions and value, the second session examines how exchange is organized through firms and platforms, and how the boundaries of the firm are being reconfigured in the digital economy. It explores why firms exist as containers for capital, risk, and technology, how they stabilise transactions and retain surplus, and how platforms function as shared coordination infrastructure that lowers transaction costs and reshapes productive scale.
Participants analyse the shifting boundary between market and hierarchy, the distinction between wage labour and capital participation, and the structural conditions enabling the rise of micro-firms. The session highlights how organisational form determines who accumulates capital, who captures surplus, and who can participate meaningfully in economic activity—laying the groundwork for ecosystem design beyond individual organisations.
Session 3: Coordinating Exchange: Coordination, Data and the Digital Economy
The third session shifts focus from organizations to coordination at the system level. It examines how markets historically coordinate decentralized activity through institutions such as rules, standards, legitimacy, and trust. Participants explore how these coordination mechanisms evolved across different institutional forms, including temples, guilds, states, and modern corporations.
The session then examines how digital technologies dramatically increase the speed and scale of exchange and value creation, often exposing coordination failures that previously remained hidden. This leads to the concept of the coordination trap, where economic activity stalls not because demand is absent but because coordination mechanisms are insufficient or fragmented. The session concludes by introducing data as a new coordination asset, enabling discovery, verification, and trust in increasingly complex and digital service ecosystems.
Session 4: Designing Smart Data Ecosystems
The fourth session introduces the Smart Data Ecosystem Canvas as a practical framework for designing digital and data-mediated ecosystems that solve coordination problems. Building on earlier sessions on transactions, firms, and data-mediated coordination, the session focuses on how structured data flows enable discovery, verification, trust, and participation at scale.
Participants learn how smart data ecosystems make actors, capabilities, and behaviours visible and verifiable, allowing decentralized coordination across organizations and sectors. Using the Smart Data Ecosystem Canvas, the session explores how purpose, roles, data primitives, transactions, and governance interact to sustain ecosystem participation and value creation.
Session 5: Smart Data Ecosystems in Practice
The final session examines how smart data ecosystems create strategic advantage by solving coordination problems that traditional market structures cannot easily address. Building on the Smart Data Ecosystem Canvas introduced in the previous session, participants analyse real-world cases where structured data sharing enables new forms of trust, discovery, and value creation.
The session focuses on three distinct coordination advantages enabled by smart data ecosystems: traceability, credibility, and discovery. Through these cases, participants explore how interoperable data flows, verifiable claims, and privacy-preserving mechanisms allow ecosystems to coordinate actors more effectively, reshape market participation, and generate new sources of competitive advantage.