Building a framework to grow ecosystems… a rough rough draft.

I have been sitting on this for a while try develop and re-work it, and I figure maybe its best to just put a draft out and get feedback. This is a rough (emphasis on rough) draft of thoughts. Let me know your thoughts and reactions.

Why ecosystems:

Businesses are about providing products or services for consumers, governments though play a different role in society. They are about creating a container where a society can not only survive but flourish (including the said businesses above). I have already written about the idea of government-as-a-platform. Here though I want to take a different focus. I want to look at government-as-an-ecosystem-builder.

A system is “​​a set of things working together as parts of a mechanism or an interconnecting network.” ~ Google

I, however, like the term ecosystem because it emphasizes the focus on the relationships between the parts and their organic, ever evolving nature. It also calls on us to look to natural systems for inspiration and guidance.

I would argue that governments often play the role of an ecosystem builder. They try to develop containers that allow the different parts flourish. These parts could be people, businesses, organizations, collectives, or even government departments.

So how does one go about building an ecosystem?

I lay out the following framework for discussion and debate.

Towards a framework:

I argue that the following six elements are key to a thriving ecosystem:

1. Developing sustainable (technological) infrastructure
2. Growing a community of organisations with a pipeline for new ones to join
3. Developing a process to grow and maintain pools of talent
4. Creating clear rules of the road (standards and regulations) and ways of enforcing them
5. Collecting and sharing stories
6. Nurturing sustainable and ethical business models that sustain a thriving ecosystem

Developing sustainable (technological) infrastructure

Any ecosystem starts with a base foundation. These are the rivers and streams, the mountains and earth, the sun, rain and general climate. It is from this base foundation that an ecosystem grows. This foundation needs to have some level of sustainability for life to take hold. Likewise a social ecosystem requires a base infrastructure that is stable and secure to develop on. This could be physical infrastructure like roads and buildings with electricity and hydro but since we live now in a digital age, this is increasingly digital infrastructure: things like broadband connection and the world wide web (and all the protocols that underpin it). It is important to understand what infrastructure is required for your ecosystem to thrive and make sure it is sustainably available.

(One of these days I want to sit down and write a whole blog on the role of government and infrastructure after all I think Government-as-a-Platform could be reworded to say Government-as-Infrastructure but that is for another day)

Growing a community of organisations with a pipeline for new ones to join

An ecosystem is alive because it has a collection of species (animals and plants) that move around, consume and produce within it. Social ecosystems are no different. They are made up of a series of species each with their own roles. The following is a potential breakdown of those species in a social system:

• Infrastructure Providers — support and maintain the base infrastructure.
• Regulators — police the space to help ensure stability.
• Service Providers — provide front line services to the consumers.
• Consultants — I pulled consultants out because I think they play a very unique role. They are the pollinators, they take ideas and spread them between the many different organisations they work for.
• Educators — nurture the growth of talent, study and develop the ecosystems knowledge of itself.
• Funders — provide resources to support new growth and development.
• Users — consume products/services and provide purpose to the ecosystem

Groups can play multiple of these roles and might switch through different roles at different times.

We need both large foundational organisations that provide stability and scale as well as a pipeline for new groups to enter the market and carve out their space, bringing with them new energy and approaches. There is a life cycle to this as well, meaning that organisations will die and with that release their energy (resources, ideas, talent) back into the space to be consumed by others.

Developing a process to grow and maintain pools of talent

Speaking of talent. Whereas the above section is about organisations, this is all about people and ideas. It is important to develop a strategy to grow and maintain talent. The quality of the individuals that make up the organisations will dictate their health and longevity. Also ecosystems are emergent, so this talent needs to be continually growing and developing to adapt to their changing surroundings. So where is your talent being trained and developed and do you have clear pathways that moves them from training and into action? Talent is also very fluid, it can easily cross ecosystems, so how do you maintain your talent? What incentives do you nurture to help keep it in place? This could be salary but increasingly people are being motivated by other factors like flexible work, opportunity for impact, communities of support and good social systems to support quality of life.

Creating clear rules of the road (standards and regulations) and ways of enforcing them

Clear and consistent standards and regulations are required to provide a stable foundation for an ecosystem to grow. This stability makes it easier for actors to enter the market and to experiment within it, allowing for growth and adaptability. It also makes it easier to set up training programs to develop the talent. Beyond that, it nurtures trust among the actors. I trust the food I buy is healthy because of a robust set of rules and regulations that guide food quality. Volatile environments make it hard for things to grow. This is not always easy. I work on the front edge of tech innovation, it is the wild west with everyday new things being developed and assumptions upended. This makes it really hard to develop standards and regulations. However, without them the chaos makes it hard for this new tech to be adopted, used and trusted. We therefore are learning to develop agile standards that can quickly adapt to emerging trends and new insights.

Collecting and sharing stories

This is one I am struggling to know how to explain well (ironically) but I know it is very important so I will try my best and maybe someone can help me do it better (@richardpietro any thoughts?). Stories are how an ecosystem builds its identity and through that its value. It is what informs and inspires people and organisations to enter and engage with the ecosystem. By being able to explain why it should exist, it then can draw in more resources and grow. I don’t think the government does this well and we often leave it to the private sector but it is crucial for building ecosystems, and it is where we get to define the values that underpin the system.

Nurturing sustainable and ethical business models that sustain a thriving ecosystem

Speaking of values…

For an ecosystem to be sustainable there needs to be stable resource flows. Groups need to have a sustainable way in which they can collect and grow their resources. What are the business models that make engagement in this ecosystem viable? It is important to note that the nature of these resource flows will shape the type of ecosystem you have and values that it nurtures. I think this is an area that could have a lot of creativity and I wish we spent more time thinking about outside the box business models instead of just falling back to the old and tired models. We are going through major social, political and economic upheaval, it is time for us to get really creative here.

Ok so there you go. My first attempt at an ecosystem building framework. The idea is that but focusing on strategies to nurture all six of these areas you will be able to develop a robust and sustainable ecosystem.

Some more loose thoughts:

Interconnectivity

I have been thinking a lot recently of another layer to this. Healthy ecosystems are the ones that are most densely interconnected to allow active sharing of resources and information.

• What does this mean for governments, how do we nurture this interconnectivity and sharing? Maybe this means serving as a convener, or even a bulletin board, a platform for the ecosystem. There is likely also likely a governance lens to this. I have been quite fascinated by the Constellation Model of governance developed by Tonya Surman at CSI.

Diversity

Healthy ecosystems also are highly diverse, with many different species interconnected into symbiotic relationships.

• There seems to be a tendency of moving towards monopolies, particularly when it comes to the digital space where economies of scale, scope and network effects drive the system towards a few big platforms. But we know from watching the natural world that this leads to fragile ecosystems. We often talk about how important small and medium enterprise are, so how do we nurture this? How also do we help the big giants that serve as keystone actors in our ecosystem (think the big trees that an ecosystem will grow around) diversify and become symbiotic with their smaller counterparts without just consuming them?