Ecosystem concepts need attention.

A sound way to look at your community.

Think about the human immune system. It is incredibly complex and brilliant. Compare it to your community’s ecosystem. Your immune system knows when you are getting sick. Sometimes, days, months, or even years go by long before the disease is eventually diagnosed.

Think what you could do if you read our immune system’s tiny, microscopic signs. We could catch and treat diseases like ovarian or pancreatic cancer before they become deadly. An early screening tool like that could save millions of lives a year. Microsoft is now working to make it a reality.

So it is with a community ecosystem. It, too, is incredibly complex and brilliant. Your community’s immune system also shows signs of getting sick. It can be days, months, or even years before the problems are recognised and any action is taken. In the meantime, the community struggles to keep pace with its wants and needs.

British botanist Arthur Tansley coined the word ecosystem in the 1930s. He referred to a localised community of living organisms interacting with each other and their particular environment of air, water, mineral soil, and other elements.

These organisms influence each other and their terrain. They compete and collaborate, share and create resources, and co-evolve. They are inevitably subject to external disruptions, to which they adapt together.

What makes up your community’s entrepreneurial ecosystems?

Approaches to defining and measuring ecosystems vary widely. However, existing resources and frameworks are vital to improving your local ecosystems. Business, education, and well-being ecosystems can make a good start.

Ecosystems constantly change; parts die, and parts are reborn.

Successful businesses are those that evolve rapidly and effectively. Innovative organisations cannot develop in a vacuum. To create supportive networks, they must attract resources, capital, partners, suppliers, and customers. I suggest that a company be viewed not as a member of a single industry but as part of a business ecosystem crossing a variety of industries. In a business ecosystem, companies co-evolve capabilities around innovation. They work cooperatively and competitively to support new products, satisfy customer needs, and eventually incorporate the next round of innovations”.

The community’s enterprises.

Enterprises are embedded in a business environment; they must co-evolve with other businesses. Newly arriving species can challenge the particular niches the businesses occupy.

Businesses and non-profit organisations need to become proactive in developing mutually beneficial relationships with customers, suppliers, and even competitors. Consider the creation of entrepreneurial ecosystems.

Studying the community’s ecosystem is a more productive way of developing and commercialising new products and services. Some view the rise of ecosystem thinking as an opportunity for creating a compelling, unique competitive advantage.

Understanding entrepreneurial ecosystems helps align all the parts of the community. What is the community’s capacity to innovate? Perhaps you could introduce the concept of local import replacement.

Business and non-profit organisations must understand the broad environment in which they work and shape those situations if they want a thriving ecosystem. This will support their goals and the community’s aspirations if they wish for long-lasting, sustainable growth and prosperity.

Quotable Quotes.

“A community should work as hard to retain good businesses for their ecosystem as they do to find new ones”. Peter Sergeant

“People need to know that they have all the tools within themselves. Self-awareness means awareness of their body, awareness of their mental space, and awareness of their relationships. Not only with each other but with life and the ecosystem”. Deepak Chopra