Building Ecosystems

The importance of relationships is one of enduring lessons in understanding how to overcome innovation fatigue and achieve innovation success. Relationships with the right people and partners are critical. Many fail to recognize that these must be nurtured and maintained, that time and effort is required. Learn this lesson from job seeking: it’s not enough to start “networking” when you are laid off. Your network, your ecosystem of relationships, is like a living organism. It takes time to become viable and healthy. When your network has been weak and neglected for years, without contributions and support from from you, don’t expect it to flower and yield fruit for you on demand.

As for building ecosystems in the business world, one recent article I would recommend (thanks to John Maloney for the tip) is “Hubs, Spokes and Islands in the Cloud.” Here Geva Perry, author of the Thinking Out Cloud blog, discusses business models related to cloud computing and discusses several ecosystem architectures. After reading that, also consider reading “The Cosmic Org Chart Is Broken: Dark Energy, Dark Matter, and the Analogy to Intangibles in Business Ecosystems.”

In Conquering Innovation Fatigue, we discuss relationships at many levels and show how the often overlooked intangibles of human relationships can encourage or suppress innovation, depending on the health of the system.

As for the title of this post, well, you don’t actually build ecosystems the way you do a building. You can get them started and you can nurture them, but if they are healthy, they will grow on their own and evolve in ways you don’t expect. When it comes to the ecosystems around an organization, your real job is to create the environment where they can be healthy and grow on their own, as Verna Allee has taught. They cannot be micromanaged without harming them.

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