By start-up difficulties, do you mean the hockey stick effect?

Exactly. It's all about scaling as quickly as possible, because that's what ecosystems thrive on. That's why financial strength plays a crucial role in the early stages: The critical mass, the market share must be brought. How do most of the asymmetrical ecosystems work? Initially, you offer services free of charge, attract customers and partners to your own platform, you let them profit from the side effects and ensure that they become more and more structurally intertwined with this platform. Then, you gradually revert the process by monetizing services or by charging for better services whilst functionally drying up the cost-free solution.

This is how convenience turns into dependency, creating high barriers to exit. These dependencies are problematic in the long term; they are not sustainable. And that is also the reason why I’m convinced that we need strong symmetric ecosystems such as GAIA-X in Europe.

But can ecosystems be thought of only in these two extreme forms? Or are there ways to reduce dependencies without having to give up the advantages of asymmetric models?

In my view, the answer is quite simple. When you enter an asymmetrical system as a customer, you build up a very comprehensive data history over time. For example, health data that arises around a medical device and, related to this, around the optimization of therapy in collaboration with the attending physician, the organization of everyday life, contact with a community, the manufacturer, and so on. If you want – or need – to switch to a device from another manufacture, the question of the data ownership arises. And this data, typically, does not belong to the patient. You cannot take this data with you – and that is the key to the problem. As long as we do not connect the right to the data to the user, we will continue to have the problem.

This brings us back to the issue of semantic.

Yes – if we all had something like a personal data container, in which our health data is stored and a universal data semantics, this would run counter to the dependency. We would have the intensity of competition that is always demanded. However, this is ultimately a question of the legal framework. At least in regulated areas, such as in the healthcare sector, efficient federal structures and thus also federal ecosystems, which are not dominated by one player, are possible.

So far, one does not see much of such federal ecosystems.

But would there be a chance to create them? Yes. This would only require, for example, that the federal states relinquish the interpretive authority to the federal level and to harmonize their different systems and data models. The reasons why this does not happen are obvious. In the industry, for example, you can see that dealers do not share their knowledge of the customer with the OEM. Although it would make sense from the standpoint of the overall optimum. But it is also the question of interpretative sovereignty and the power within the value added chain. So it is always a question of who has the right to the data and whether the circulation of data, information and knowledge can be kept transparent and tracked.

However, there is definitely movement. In many corporations, silos are gradually being dismantled and fair approaches are being sought to integrate data with partners. It's also increasingly happening where there is a higher level of interest – for example, in the healthcare sector, in disaster response.

It is also important to remember that the willingness of users to make their data available in an asymmetric ecosystem without clear rules is decreasing worldwide. Similarly, legislators are becoming less willing to simply stand by as these business models scale, or to allow data to be used beyond its original purpose. In asymmetric systems today, enormous amounts of data are generated and the semantic model is clearly dominated. But the full potential for generating knowledge cannot be unleashed.