Overview
The original 3EO Toolkit v1.0 — canvases for entrepreneurial, ecosystem-driven organizations
The 3EO Toolkit (Entrepreneurial Ecosystem-Enabling Organization) is Boundaryless's toolkit for designing the internal organization that matches an ecosystem-driven strategy. Where the PDT answers "how do we engage with the ecosystem around us?", the 3EO answers "how do we organize ourselves to thrive in an ecosystemic world?"
The 3EO Toolkit is preserved here as a narrative archive. The canvases are still in active use and appear in the Canvas Library. The organizational design techniques will progressively be formalized into modern pipelines.
The three dimensions of organizational evolution
The 3EO is built around three complementary dimensions of how an organization can evolve:
- Ecosystemic — Synthesizing competition and collaboration through mechanisms that involve multiple internal and external entities in value co-creation
- Enabling — Intentionally fragmenting support functions and shared services into accelerators of customer value
- Entrepreneurial — Enabling individuals and teams to identify, explore, and pursue new business opportunities continuously
These three dimensions show up again and again in the canvases — from the initial Envisioning Canvas to the Strategy Setting Canvas, and in the topology designs of the 3EO Map and Micro-Enterprise Canvas.
The toolkit content
User Guide
The full 3EO Toolkit 1.0 User Guide — canvas-by-canvas narrative, instructions, and worked examples.
Adoption Guide
Strategic guidance on when and how to adopt each 3EO canvas in an organizational transformation.
Canvases in this toolkit
Strategic layer
- Envisioning Canvas — Define the target scenario across the three dimensions
- Strategy Setting Canvas — Translate the vision into strategic initiatives
Organizational design layer
- The 3EO Map — Map the organization's topology (platform, MEs, SSPs, external)
- Ecosystem Micro-Community Canvas — Design internal communities
- Micro-Enterprise Canvas — Design an individual Micro-Enterprise unit
- Value Adjustment Mechanism Canvas — Design internal market mechanisms
Experimentation layer
- 3EO Organizational Experiment Canvas — Design and run organizational experiments
Credits
The 3EO Toolkit was inspired by Haier's Rendanheyi model and developed over years of organizational design work with companies transforming into platform and ecosystem organizations. Released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International.
Related reading
The modern reorganization of 3EO content is forthcoming. In the meantime, the 3EO canvases are already used in the Portfolio Mapping pipeline — specifically in the Organizational Elements Analysis technique.