What are Ecosystems?

Ecosystems are ever-changing networks of people, resources, organizations, and the relationships between them, united by a common characteristic, such as a shared geography, industry, demographic, or combination of those factors.

Even if you haven’t heard the definition, you’ve probably heard it used. Baltimore’s Tech Ecosystem refers to the tech and startup community within the city of Baltimore. The Web3 Ecosystem refers to the collection of people, businesses, and other organizations who are involved with or building in Web3. Dallas’ Arts Ecosystem, The CleanTech Ecosystem, and Cisco’s Partner Ecosystem all simply refer to the constellation of people, organizations, resources, and the activity & relationships involved in those communities.

Ecosystems are everywhere. Every community is an ecosystem, every city is home to dozens of ecosystems, and every industry, sector, and subsector is an ecosystem as well. Their prevalence is one of the main reasons why ecosystems are so important to understand - most of us live and work in numerous ecosystems.

The ‘characteristics that unite’ an ecosystem include industries (the Bioscience ecosystem), business models ****(the high growth startup ecosystem), geographies (Baltimore’s ecosystem), demographic groups ****(the Women-Owned ecosystem), and combinations of these factors ****(the Baltimore Women-Owned high-growth bioscience ecosystem). Because of this, ecosystems can be infinitely nested within eachother, and adjacent ecosystems often overlap (such as the Maryland Business Ecosystem and Baltimore’s tech ecosystem).

These Unifying Factors, one of four core attributes of ecosystems, is what create the boundaries of an ecosystem. But what are ecosystems actually made of? Ecosystems are built by Assets and the Relationships between them. Primary Assets are the main “things” within an ecosystem, and they include People, Organizations, and Resources. Secondary Assets are typically smaller, transient (their importance is time-based), and they arise from actions and interactions between Primary Assets. These include ****Events, Jobs, and News.

The Relationships are simply how these assets relate to eachother - which Organization provides which Resource, what Person is employed by what Organization, which Organizations partner together, etc. Structurally, ecosystems are complex networks, meaning they are made of nodes and edges, representing the Assets (nodes) and the Relationships between them (edges).

Despite their vast differences, every town, city, state, industry, sector, professional network, economy, impact initiative, demographic group, and beyond all share the ecosystem structure. If ecosystems are so vast, numerous, and diverse, what’s the use in studying ecosystems generically? Because of their shared structure, all ecosystems are remarkably similar in the way information flows through them, how they change and are changed, and the challenges they face.

Studying the generic ecosystem is the most effective way to understand both how a new industry is formed and how a main-street economy is transformed. Lessons learned from entrepreneurial ecosystem building can be applied to partner-network development, and the challenges faced by innovation ecosystems shed light on how we can improve small business communities. Studying ecosystems is a shortcut to understanding the numerous networks that we live & work in everyday.

Ecosystems are incredibly complex, diverse, and complicated, and the entire Ecosystem Information Center is dedicated to breaking them down. To make the information digestible, we split up core concepts into different articles, and we’ll always link to the relevant articles below, as well as the next one you should read if you want to learn about ecosystems from the ground up. Now that we have an idea of what ecosystems are, less discuss why they are so important.

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