The Ecosystem Structure

When we launched the EcoMap, a platform that helps people navigate the assets within an ecosystem, we had intended it for entrepreneurial ecosystems, like small business or tech communities. Shortly after launching, however, we were being contacted by Fortune 100 organizations and multi-national foundations who wanted to use the technology to understand and navigate their industries, partner networks, impact initiatives, and more.

At first, we were baffled - how could one tool fit so many use cases? After studying hundreds of ecosystems across the world, we realized something crucial - no matter if we were looking at a Rural Main Street in Minnesota or the entire Augmented Reality industry, all of these ecosystems shared the same fundamental structure:

• They were ever-changing networks
• Made up of people, organizations, and resources
• United by a common characteristics
• Which generated jobs, events, news, and other activity
• and are bound together through relationships

These characteristics form the basis of the Ecosystem Structure. Ecosystems are networks, and like most networks, they are made up of nodes and edges. The Nodes of an ecosystem are the Assets, including Primary Assets, including People, Organizations, and Resources; and Secondary Assets, including Jobs, Events, and News.

All of these assets are part of the ecosystem because they share some Unifying Factor - whether that is a common geography, industry, demographic trait, business model, focus area, or, most often, a combination of these factors. For example, you might have ‘Baltimore’s Tech Ecosystem’ and the “AgTech Female-Led Growth Startup Ecosystem’.

Just because assets are part of the same ecosystem does not mean they “know” eachother -t hat’s where Relationships come in. The Edges of an ecosystem are the Relationships between different assets: Which Organization provides which Resource? Which Person runs which Program? Which Organization offers which Jobs? What Resources are the focus of this News article?

Through these shared Relationships, the ecosystem structure is formed. When plotted out, nearly all ecosystems end up resembling a network graph, and certain types of ecosystems have similar underlying network structures. For example, most small business communities have a large number of nodes and generally thin edges between them, while deep tech commercialization networks have fewer nodes with very thick edges between them.

The number of nodes gives a good, but not perfect, indication of the size of an ecosystem - it refers to how many different assets (People, Organizations, Resources) are involved in that ecosystem. Small ecosystems, like a Rural Main Street, may only have a few dozen nodes, whereas large ecosystems - such as an entire industry, will have dozens of thousands of nodes.

The number of edges in an ecosystem indicates the degree of interconnectedness of that ecosystem - how many relationships exist between different assets? 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 nodes, the ecosystem is highly interconnected.

An ecosystem’s Unifying Factors, size, and interconnectedness are all Attributes of ecosystems themselves. In addition to characteristics specific to the ecosystem, every node and edge within the ecosystem has important characteristics as well - such as the type of asset (organizations, resources, people, etc) and the category of relationships (funding relationships, partnerships, etc).

All of these different elements are what come together to form the Ecosystem Structure, and we’ll now look at each in more detail. First, we’ll examine Assets, and discuss the difference between Primary and Secondary ecosystem Assets in detail. Then, we’ll look at Relationships - how these assets are related to each other. Finally, we’ll examine the main ecosystem-wide Attributes, including the Unifying Factors, Size, Interconnectedness, and Stage of Development.

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