Attributes of Ecosystems

At this point, we’ve examined both Assets and Relationships within ecosystems, as well as the characteristics of both, such as the type of Asset or the categories of relationships. But what about attributes that are inherent to ecosystems themselves, not just their parts?

Ecosystem-level Attributes are the different characteristics that help us understand a given ecosystem.Collectively, these attributes are what “define” an ecosystem, and they include:

• Unifying Factors
• Size
• Interconnectedness
• Stage of Development

Notice that Ecosystem Type is not included in this list (Types here including entrepreneurial communities, partner networks, industries, etc). As is explained in detail in “Types of Ecosystems”, ecosystems all share the same basic network structure, but the makeup of that network itself itself varies - such as the average proportion of nodes vs edges, the strength of relationships, and the levels of interconnectedness and presence of clusters within the ecosystem. Like ecosystem attributes, each of these things can vary on an ecosystem-by-ecosystem basis, but Ecosystem Types share general network trends and characteristics. In contrast, you can have two ecosystems of the same type, but with vastly different unifying factors, sizes, stages of development, and degrees of interconnectedness.

In summary, Ecosystem Types refer to different trends within network structures, whereas Ecosystem Attributes refer to the characteristics of an individual ecosystem.

Unifying Factors

Returning back to our definition of ecosystems, ecosystems are ever-changing networks of people, resources, organizations, and the relationships between them united by a common characteristic. These characteristics are what we call Unifying Factors, and they are the main determinants of “what” an ecosystem is. They include: Geography, Industry, Demographic Traits, Business Models, and Focus Areas.

Typically, a given ecosystem has multiple unifying factors. We provide some examples below, with the focused unifying factors italicized:

• Geography: Baltimore’s tech ecosystem. Maryland’s business ecosystem. Ghana’s entrepreneurial ecosystem
• Industry: Virginia’s Bioscience ecosystem, the Augmented and Virtual Reality ecosystem
• Demographic Traits: Baltimore’s Black-Owned Business ecosystem, the Native-Led Service Provider ecosystem
• Business Models: Baltimore’s tech ecosystem, Baltimore’s Small Business Ecosystem
• Focus Area: Baltimore’s homeless service ecosystem, EcoMap’s partner ecosystem

Most of these factors are straightforward, but the Focus Area deserves some extra attention. A Focus Area can be anything ranging from a specific problem (such as hunger or network security protocols), a specific asset (such as a specific company or individual), or even a specific concept (such as ‘homelessness prevention’, or ‘network decentralization’). While Focus Area is a bit of a catchall, it is crucial for accurately capture different types of ecosystems that are united by non-traditional or hyper-specific characteristics.

Size of the Ecosystem

The size of any given ecosystem is highly variable, and is often and best measured through the number of assets that are considered “within” the ecosystem. However, ecosystems are (generally) open systems, meaning their boundaries are flexible and porous, which makes measuring their size inherently difficult.

Is a Venture Capital Fund based in DC that invests heavily in Baltimore startups part of the Baltimore Tech Ecosystem? The best answer will depend on why you are trying to measure the ecosystem. If you’re trying to determine how many VC firms are headquartered within the city, then a DC-based fund wouldn’t count for Baltimore. On the other hand, if you’re trying to determine the degree of access to capital for entrepreneurs within Baltimore, then a DC-based fund that actively invests in Baltimore would be counted.

Changing an ecosystem’s boundaries based on the question at hand may grate some more scientifically-minded folks, but in order to get a measurement of the “size” of an ecosystem, you must determine a boundary of some sort. If that boundary varies based on specific criteria, then you simply end up with various measurements of an ecosystems ‘size’.

There are two things to note about the “size” of ecosystems**. First, the number of edges within an ecosystem shouldn’t be considered for size measurements,** because the number of relationships between assets is a measure of interconnectedness instead. Second, the spread of an ecosystem refers to the geographic reach of all the assets. You can have a relatively small ecosystem (for example, the ecosystem of Black-Led Female-Founded Growth Startups in the AI Industry) that only has a few assets within it, but those assets could be spread across the entire world. In this case, the size of the ecosystem is small, but it’s spread is large.

Interconnectedness

Interconnectedness is the degree to which different assets within an ecosystem are connected; the number of edges relative to the number of nodes in the network. It is a measure of not only how many relationships exist within an ecosystem (which would naturally scale with the number of assets), but also the ratio of nodes to edges (how many relationships are there between a given number of assets), and the strength of those relationships.

If there are relatively few relationships compared to the number of assets, you have an ecosystem with low interconnectedness. If you have many relationships between assets, the ecosystem is highly interconnected.

The notion of interconnectedness becomes highly important in the discussion of ecosystem clusters and silos. Ecosystem Clusters are groups of assets with numerous and strong relationships between them. Silos are assets or clusters within the ecosystem that are not well-connected to the rest of the ecosystem. In this way, even though both are determined on degrees of interconnectedness, not all clusters are silos, and neither clusters or silos are inherently bad. These are discussed in depth in Ecosystem Challenges: Breaking Down Silos.

There are a few ways to measure interconnectedness, but the simplest is the ratio of nodes to edges - the ratio between the number of assets that are part of an ecosystem and the number of relationships between different assets. Determining the relatively interconnectedness of an ecosystem is important because it gives insights into how the ecosystem will act. Information flows more easily within ecosystems with high interconnectedness, but highly-interconnected ecosystems are also much harder to change. Additionally, the degree of interconnectedness can give insights into an ecosystems stage of development, the most abstract of the ecosystem attributes.

Stage of Development

The stage of an ecosystems development is simultaneously one of the most important and hardest to measure attributes of an ecosystem. Stage of development is so hard to measure because there are no set definitions for what constitutes a “young” vs a “mature” ecosystem, or the characteristics that each of those states implies. Additionally, the definition of ‘young’ vs ‘mature’ will vary based on the type of ecosystem and what is being measured.

Still, there are a few generalizations that can be made around the stage of an ecosystem’s development. Here are different measures that can be used to determine how ‘relatively developed’ a given ecosystem is:

• Rate of change - how quickly is an ecosystem changing? How often are new assets entering or being formed within the ecosystem? How rapidly are relationships being made or broken? Are the boundaries of the ecosystem actively expanding or shrinking? Young ecosystems tend to have higher ‘rates of change’ across all of these areas, and as an ecosystem matures, these rates of change slow
• Actual and relative age of assets - we’re not talking about the age of the People in the ecosystem - well… not exactly. There are two ways to consider the “age” of assets in an ecosystem. The first is the Actual age of an asset - how many years has a given Resource or Organization (or indeed, a Person) existed? The second is the relative age of these assets - how long has each asset been part of the ecosystem? In younger ecosystems, the average relative age of assets will be lower, and in more mature ecosystems, many of the assets will have “been around” for longer, so the relative age of assets will be higher
• Degree of Interconnectedness - as a rule of thumb, the more mature and ecosystem is, the longer it has been around, and thus there has been more time for assets to form more relationships within the ecosystem, resulting in higher ecosystem interconnectedness. In younger ecosystems, there has been less time for relationships to be formed, so the degree of interconnectedness will be lower. However, this rule isn’t perfect - in large, spread our, or disjointed ecosystems, interconnectedness will be low regardless of age. This says more about the health of an ecosystem than its stage of development.
• Formal definition of Unifying Factors - the final factor in the stage of an ecosystems development is simply how long has its core unifying factors been around? This is easiest to understand in the case of Industries - the Web3 Ecosystem is generally going to be “young” compared to other ecosystems, because Web3 has really only been around as an industry for a few years. For most unifying factors, however, when the factor was formally defined is not a very helpful consideration - the fact that Baltimore has been around as a geography for 293 years doesn’t provide too much context into the stage of development of Baltimore’s tech ecosystem or small business community

Despite the ambiguity in how it is measured, the Stage of an ecosystem’s development can provide crucial insights into how the ecosystem might be structured, how difficult it may be to change it, and at what cadence the ecosystem needs to be measured , or re-mapped, in order for the data to be accurate.

Unifying Factors, Size, Interconnectedness, and the Stage of Development are important attributes that every ecosystem will have. No matter if you’re looking at a legacy industry or a tiny new main-street community, these different attributes can be both identified and tracked over time. Some of them won’t really change - such as the Unifying Factors, which define the ecosystem, and other attributes will change often, such as the size, interconnectedness, and the stage of development.

Before we dive into the different Types of ecosystems, we’ll now turn our attention towards the common challenges that ecosystems of all types face, and how the structure and attributes of ecosystems lead to these challenges.

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