Every capability a business needs has two prices: what it costs to build, and what it costs to trust someone else to build it for you.
Ronald Coase’s 1937 paper “The Nature of the Firm” asked a question economists hadn’t seriously asked before: if markets are supposed to be efficient, why do firms exist at all, instead of every task being contracted out individually? His answer was transaction costs — the cost of finding, negotiating with, and monitoring an outside party. A firm exists wherever it’s cheaper to organise a task internally than to keep going back to the market for it. Oliver Williamson’s 1979 work on transaction-cost economics turned this into a practical framework: the more specialised, uncertain, or frequent a task is, the more it favours building in-house; the more standardised and commodity-like it is, the more it favours buying.
This is the exact fork of build versus buy. A “cut-paste solution”, a chatbot, a scheduler, a generic automation is a commodity: buy it. A specialised IT tool, new tech, build it once and resell the same thing repeatedly. An “ecosystem”, a coordinated, business-specific combination of tools is closer to the specialised end, where in-house judgment about how the pieces fit together is the actual product being sold. Wardley Mapping is the tool built specifically to visualise where any given component sits on that spectrum, so the build-or-buy call isn’t a guess.
Source: Coase, R.H. (1937), “The Nature of the Firm,” Economica, 4(16), 386–405; Williamson, O.E. (1979), “Transaction-Cost Economics: The Governance of Contractual Relations,” The Journal of Law and Economics, 22(2), 233–261.