By Nkemdilim Iheanachor | Professor of Strategic Management, Lagos Business School
For decades, the dominant logic of business strategy has been built around a single unit of analysis: the firm. Build walls. Protect your advantages. Lock out competitors. The stronger your moat, the safer your position.
But according to Professor Nkemdilim Iheanachor, whose research sits at the intersection of digital strategy and Africa’s evolving business landscape, that logic is rapidly becoming obsolete, and nowhere is this more evident than in Africa’s digital economy.
“When practice evolves faster than theory, theory must change,” he argues. “And in Africa, practice has been evolving at a pace that most strategy textbooks have not caught up with.”
The Problem with Moats
The traditional Silicon Valley playbook was built for a particular kind of market: one with stable infrastructure, predictable regulations, and contracts you could enforce. In that environment, building a competitive moat made sense. Scale fast, lock in users, and make it expensive for anyone to compete with you.
But in markets like Nigeria, where regulation shifts, infrastructure falters, and trust often matters more than contracts, that playbook produces diminishing returns. Standing alone doesn’t protect you. It isolates you.
“Profitability is shaped less by effort and more by industry structure,” Iheanachor notes. “And the structure of Africa’s digital economy is fundamentally networked. The firms that are winning are not the ones with the highest walls; they are the ones with the most connections.”
Three Hard Realities
Through his research into Africa’s digital economy, Prof. Iheanachor has identified three realities that leaders, founders, and policymakers must confront.
The first is what he calls the Death of the Solo Firm. Value is no longer created behind closed doors. It emerges in everyday interactions between banks, fintechs, platforms, agents, regulators, and customers. “Your most valuable assets may not appear on the balance sheet,” he observes. “They live in relationships with partners, customers, communities, and ecosystems.”
The second is the Paradox of Constraints. Africa’s infrastructure gaps and regulatory complexity, long framed as obstacles to growth, are increasingly functioning as catalysts for a different kind of innovation. “Power outages, patchy networks, and regulatory uncertainty haven’t stopped innovation; they’ve forced firms to innovate together,” he explains. Necessity, it turns out, is not just the mother of invention. It is the mother of collaboration.
The third reality is perhaps the most consequential for how leaders think about competitive advantage. Prof. Iheanachor calls it Ecosystem Orchestration. “Your real competitive advantage is no longer what you own. It’s who you can connect, coordinate, and enable at scale.” In practical terms, this means the most powerful position in any market is not necessarily the largest firm; it is the firm that makes the entire network function better.
A New Kind of Thinking
Underlying all three realities is a shift in the cognitive demands placed on leaders. The skills that built successful firms in the twentieth century – focus, efficiency, vertical integration – are necessary but no longer sufficient.
“Ecosystem thinking is a skill: see the whole, connect the parts, create value that benefits many, not just a few,” Prof. Iheanachor argues. “The future belongs to systems thinkers, not silo builders.”
This is not simply a philosophical point. It has direct implications for how organisations are structured, how strategies are documented, and how managers make decisions on the ground. “Strategy isn’t what’s documented,” he notes. “It comes alive in what managers actually do, every day.”
Africa as Laboratory
What makes Prof. Iheanachor’s research particularly significant is its global implications. The ecosystem dynamics playing out across Africa’s digital economy are not a localised phenomenon to be observed from a distance. They are an early signal of where strategy everywhere is heading.
“Africa isn’t just adopting global strategy, it’s redefining what strategy means,” he argues. “The future of strategy will be written across networks, not within firms acting alone.”
In that sense, the shifts underway in Lagos, Nairobi, Accra, and Kigali are less a case study in emerging market adaptation and more a preview of the strategic challenges that firms everywhere will eventually face. Africa isn’t merely catching up. It is, in many respects, ahead.
“Africa isn’t merely adapting global strategy. We are becoming the laboratory where the future of strategy is being written.”
Nkemdilim Iheanachor is a Professor of Strategic Management at Lagos Business School, Pan-Atlantic University. His research focuses on digital strategy, ecosystem value creation, and competitive dynamics in Africa’s digital economy.