harvesting more than metaphors from the business ecosystem garden
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8/6/2019 Harvesting More Than Metaphors From the Business Ecosystem Garden
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Thinking Ahead White Paper Series
Working Paper Harvesting more thanMetaphors fromtheBusiness Ecosystem AdvancedManufacturingInstitute
Introduction
There is recognition of ecosystem as a metaphor for the economy and the interworking of entities in
that economy. We use terms like grow and harvest to talk about profits, terms like fertile to talk about
markets and even fairly recently we added the term Economic Gardening as an activity to be conducted
by economic development agents. To be fair, economic gardening is more than a simple metaphor to
describe an existing set of activities, it is an enlighten way to grow a local economy by helping local
companies.
Hidden in plain sight behind the metaphors is the biomimic reality of the business ecosystem.i
Considering the depth of the ecosystem metaphor can expose more rational ways to look at helping a
local economy.
Old‐growthBusiness
For example, if one is to consider existing businesses as old growth trees, their value in the economy
becomes a little clearer. Old‐Growth businesses (stage 3 and 4 as well as some mature stage 2 in the
terminology of the Lowe foundation)ii are the large businesses that succeed or fail independent of the
local economy. What is less recognized is how they sometimes provide the shade and the habitat that
makes it possible for new businesses to succeed.
Sometimes new businesses grow like sprigs maintaining the genetic code of the senior business and
often fighting for the same resources. Others still, grow in the shade of the old growth companies, using
the microclimate created under the canopy, the trained workforce or the focused infrastructure. The
examples where other smaller entities actually help the old‐growth elements are more subtle and a
harder to identify like the pollination by insects or the way a sapsucker may help defend a tree from
insect attack .
So what is the role for an economic development agent in a business ecosystem? It is suggested that the
agent may act as a gardener, yet we do not want our local agents planting and weeding businesses by
their own whim. Nor do we want the economic development agent to act as a tree surgeon, diagnosing
and treating private companies. It would also be unfair to evaluate the agent on these expectations for
in most cases the larger environment and the business’ internal factors will have more influence on the
health of the old‐growth companies than any single agent’s intervention.
What might be the most valuable position for the conscious actors in this ecosystem is as planner, architect and horticulturalist (a planitectrculturalist?), helping identify the microclimates in around the
old growth companies that will create synergistic opportunities and the cases where seedlings will grow.
What we are describing is a mode of operating somewhere between terraforming and gardening. This is
the mode in which an economic development agent must work by understanding the specific
environmental conditions and helping craft a landscape that fosters diversity and synergy while
watching out for weak branches and keeping an eye out for chances to pollenate new ideas.
8/6/2019 Harvesting More Than Metaphors From the Business Ecosystem Garden
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i Biomimicry or biomimetics is the examination of nature, its models, systems, processes, and elements
to emulate or take inspiration from in order to solve human problems. The
termbiomimicry and biomimetics come from the Greek words bios, meaning life, and mimesis, meaning
to imitate. Other terms often used are bionics, bio‐inspiration, and biognosis.
ii http://edwardlowe.org/
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