Why do Ecosystems Matter?

Ecosystems appear in so many areas of our daily lives, from our local business community, to our professional network, and the industry we work in. Whether we pay attention to them or not, everyone is surrounded by ecosystems - most people are part of a dozen or so ecosystems without even realizing it, spanning your university’s alumni network to your neighborhood community.

In a way, ecosystems matter simply because they are everywhere.

But why should we spend the time to understand ecosystems? There are two reasons.

First, studying ecosystems generically provides a shortcut for understanding how all different types of ecosystems work. Because of their shared underlying structure, you can learn a lot about how information flows through an industry by studying how information flows through a small community. If you are trying to tackle silos within your city’s tech community, you can examine how silos were broken down in the small business community.

Ecosystems - despite their vast diversity in size, type, and stage of development - share not only the same structure, but also tend to face the same challenges. Studying ecosystems allows you to quickly distill insights that are applicable across pretty much any network or community you find yourself in.

Secondarily, ecosystems can be incredible tools for change. Let’s say you want to create a stronger entrepreneurial community at a university. You could start an organization that provided an entrepreneurship club, incubator, accelerator, angel funding, conferences, and a mentor network. While possible, setting up that organization & getting the funding to run it takes an incredible amount of time and effort, and then there’s the uphill battle of promoting the organization and getting people into it’s network.

Alternatively, you could use an ecosystem-based approach - identify all the different clubs, people, and events that are interested in entrepreneurship, create or strengthen the bonds between them, and mobilize each individual asset to set up a key part of the ecosystem. This approach is drastically more effective - it not only distributes the work, but it has a greater reach since each asset engages it’s own network, and it encourages more equitable engagement and outcomes because more people becoming involved in the growth of the ecosystem.

We've witnessed both of these factors play out on scales large and small. The Ecosystem Information Center is an initiative of EcoMap Technologies, which creates platforms that help people navigate different ecosystems. Originally, the tool was built to support entrepreneurial ecosystems. But shortly after launch, there was demand for the solution from all types of organizations, building all types of ecosystems, in all corners of the world.

We’ve seen ecosystems large and small, young and developed, formal and informal - and all of them share the same underlying characteristics and face the same challenges. Additionally, we are - and have worked with - ecosystem builders across the world, and we’ve witnessed the incredible change that comes from using an Ecosystem-Led Development approach.

Ecosystems matter not only because they are everywhere, but because they provide a simple way for us to understand the vast, complicated networks that we operate in, and they provide a model for creating systems-level change that is dramatically more effective than the discrete-change tactics that we tend to use. In short, understanding ecosystems gives us the tools we need to tackle systems-level problems and make sense of the complicated communities around us.