The Ecosystem as a Living Organism: Creating the Conditions for Innovation
How stewardship, connection, and reciprocal exchange help entrepreneurial communities thrive.
Watch a river long enough, and you begin to see more than water moving downstream. Tributaries converge. Currents shift. Water carries nutrients, sustains life along its banks, and supports environments far beyond its source.
Innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystems depend on similar movement. People bring knowledge, talent, relationships, resources, and capital. Their value develops as participants exchange them, apply them, and contribute something back.
Structures can improve that movement. They can also create bottlenecks, making access dependent on a particular institution or individual.
For ecosystem builders, the question becomes: Are our practices helping resources circulate—or making their movement dependent on us?
This perspective brings together research on entrepreneurial ecosystems, social networks, complexity leadership, and organizational learning. Its central argument is that ecosystem vitality depends on how people, knowledge, resources, and capital connect, circulate, and replenish—and that our role is to cultivate those conditions.
An ecosystem is alive—and constantly becoming
My view of the corporation as an organism extends to the relationships surrounding it. Founders, businesses, universities, investors, public institutions, and community organizations continually influence one another.
Spigel’s (2017) research provides a relational foundation for this perspective. His study of Waterloo and Calgary examines how cultural, social, and material attributes interact to provide resources for entrepreneurs. The relationships among those attributes help reproduce the ecosystem.
Stam and van de Ven (2021) similarly treat entrepreneurial ecosystems as interdependent actors and factors. Their study of twelve Dutch regions found a strong relationship between ecosystem quality and the prevalence of high-growth firms, alongside substantial interrelationships among ecosystem elements.
These studies support looking beyond inventories of institutions and programs toward how their contributions work together. A well-resourced institution can remain difficult to access; a useful relationship can help connect its capabilities to an unmet need.
An ecosystem is constantly becoming: participants learn, enter, leave, collaborate, and change roles. Its vitality involves both institutional capability and evolving relationships.
The organism metaphor has limits. Independent participants retain different purposes and obligations. An entrepreneurial ecosystem has no single brain or owner. The practical challenge is coordination that preserves autonomy.
Cultivating the conditions for vitality
This perspective changes what ecosystem leadership asks of us.
The living organism is the lens. Stewardship is the responsibility to care for the conditions that sustain ecosystem health. Facilitation is the practice of connecting participants, revealing gaps, reducing friction, and supporting follow-through.
Uhl-Bien, Marion, and McKelvey’s (2007) complexity leadership theory offers a relevant foundation. Developed for knowledge-producing organizations, it emphasizes enabling learning, creativity, and adaptation through interactions, alongside necessary administrative functions.
Applied to ecosystem practice, this suggests a role for leaders in creating conditions for collaboration while recognizing that outcomes emerge through participants’ actions.
Dhanaraj and Parkhe’s (2006) framework for orchestrating innovation networks adds another dimension. It identifies knowledge mobility, innovation appropriability, and network stability as central processes. Knowledge needs to move, participants need confidence that they can benefit from their contributions, and relationships need sufficient continuity.
A useful hub can make resources visible, identify silos, and connect complementary efforts. My stewardship proposition is that its effectiveness should also be judged by participants’ growing ability to collaborate directly.
That includes transparent decisions, responsible resource use, and clear expectations. Autonomy and accountability belong together.
Creative elasticity between networks
In Creative Elasticity: The Missing Characteristic of Adaptive Space, I explored how Adaptive Space can allow ideas and relationships to develop beyond initial assumptions while remaining connected to strategic intent.
At the ecosystem level, I extend that perspective to the potential for connected networks to expand what participants can imagine and create together. Each participant retains its own purpose; collaboration creates room for possibilities beyond any one organization’s original expectations.
Granovetter’s (1973) work on weak ties explains how connections between social circles can carry information beyond familiar groups. Hargadon and Sutton’s (1997) ethnographic study of IDEO shows how a product development firm combined knowledge from different industries to generate innovative solutions.
Together, these studies suggest mechanisms through which connections can expand possibilities: access to unfamiliar knowledge and the ability to recombine it.
Imagine a founder community engaging a research network. Researchers contribute methods and discoveries; founders contribute customer problems. Industry partners bring operating experience, while workforce organizations identify skills and training implications.
Participants may begin to recognize applications that none could readily see alone.
Relationship quality matters. Hargadon and Sutton also emphasize organizational routines for acquiring, retaining, and retrieving knowledge. Exposure alone is insufficient. Creative elasticity requires meaningful exchange and the capacity to work with what emerges.
Creative elasticity is my interpretive extension of these mechanisms. It describes a potential to cultivate and investigate, rather than an outcome that follows automatically from increasing connections.
Community gives connection continuity
In Why Community Is the Hidden Engine of Innovation, I explored how relationships among employees, customers, and partners support shared learning and collaborative problem-solving. Its framework—Connect, Collaborate, Co-Create, Catalyze—offers a practical bridge between participation and purposeful action.
The organism perspective extends that discussion. Community gives people reasons to remain engaged, share what they are learning, and contribute beyond an immediate request. A relationship can continue after the first introduction, allowing new needs and opportunities to surface.
The practical challenge is to sustain both trust within communities and openness between them. Spigel’s (2017) relational account and Granovetter’s (1973) work on ties between social circles help explain why familiar relationships and access to unfamiliar perspectives both matter.
Where the ecosystem connects to innovativeness
This is where the organism perspective connects directly to StratAscension’s focus on organizational innovativeness.
Ecosystem exchange creates opportunities. Organizational innovativeness supplies the capacity to recognize, develop, test, and commercialize them.
Cohen and Levinthal’s (1990) concept of absorptive capacity explains an important part of this relationship. Organizations need prior related knowledge to recognize the value of external information, assimilate it, and apply it commercially.
A company can encounter promising research yet lack the expertise to evaluate it. A founder can receive useful feedback yet struggle to translate it into a stronger offering. Access to opportunity and the ability to act on it are connected challenges.
For StratAscension, this makes leadership, culture, learning practices, and execution capacity essential parts of the conversation. Leaders establish priorities. People need opportunities to question assumptions and test ideas. Teams need responsibility, resources, and processes for translating learning into action.
Absorptive capacity explains a knowledge-related mechanism within this broader view of innovativeness. It does not, by itself, encompass every capability required for innovation.
The relationship also runs back toward the ecosystem. Spigel and Harrison (2018) argue that entrepreneurial activity generates resources—including capital, skilled workers, and entrepreneurial knowledge—that can support future ventures when they circulate through social networks.
Possibilities can emerge through interaction; realizing their value requires intentional action. That action can generate resources for others.
A founder journey makes the flow visible
Cha Coffee Co.’s experience provides a practical illustration.
The company participated in Spark PGC 1 Million Cups as both a presenter and beverage sponsor.
Its founders received community feedback while contributing their beverages to the gathering.
They applied that feedback in preparing for the Dingman Pitch Event, which they won. Subsequently,
Cha Coffee Co. secured a contract with COPT Defense Properties to sell its beverages at properties within the company’s portfolio.
Several forms of value appear in this progression: an opportunity to be heard, useful knowledge, recognition, customer access, and a pathway to revenue.
Viewed through the research, the story illustrates how community resources can become useful through relationships and entrepreneurial action. Feedback had to be considered and applied.
Opportunities required preparation and follow-through.
The founders supplied that effort. The community contributed to the conditions surrounding it.
The contract also broadens how we discuss financial resources. Customer revenue is distinct from investment capital, but access to paying customers can help sustain operations and support development.
The story illustrates the mechanisms discussed here without attributing every milestone to a single introduction or organization. Community support became consequential through the founders’ decisions and follow-through.
The next opportunity is to cultivate reciprocal relationships over time. Founders who receive support can return with lessons, introductions, expertise, and opportunities for others. Cha Coffee Co.’s beverage sponsorship already demonstrates a contribution to the community; future exchanges should develop through relationships rather than an expectation of immediate repayment.
That is how participation can become an ongoing part of community life, with knowledge and opportunity moving in several directions.
Recognizing ecosystem health
The research encourages us to examine both available resources and the processes through which people access and use them.
Stam and van de Ven (2021) offer an approach to measuring ecosystem elements. Spigel and Harrison (2018) direct attention toward resource generation and circulation over time.
Building on those perspectives, practitioners can ask:
Can people access relevant opportunities beyond their existing circles?
Do introductions lead to useful action and founder progress?
Can participants collaborate without depending on one central organization?
Are resources reaching unmet needs and underserved participants?
Do participants return knowledge, opportunities, relationships, or capital?
Can collaboration continue when a leader, funder, or institution exits?
These are proposed questions for local learning, rather than a validated universal scorecard.
They help shift attention toward what participation makes possible. An introduction is a beginning; understanding what follows reveals more about the usefulness of the connection.
A global perspective rooted in local practice
Ecosystem practitioners around the world face different institutional strengths, cultural expectations, and resource constraints.
Spigel’s (2017) comparison demonstrates that ecosystems can have different configurations. This supports examining local relationships and conditions before adopting a model developed elsewhere.
Practitioners can explore where access depends too heavily on gatekeepers, where complementary networks remain disconnected, and where incentives favor organizational visibility over collective progress.
The contribution I am proposing is a practical synthesis: use the living-organism lens to understand interdependence; stewardship to clarify responsibility; facilitation to support movement; creative elasticity to describe expanding possibilities; and innovativeness to explain the capacity required to realize value.
Peer-reviewed research grounds the mechanisms informing this perspective. Its further contribution can be examined through comparative and longitudinal research: do these stewardship practices improve access and founder progress, and can collaboration endure as particular leaders and institutions change?
Returning to the river
A river’s vitality becomes visible in the life it supports throughout its course.
For ecosystem stewards, our contribution can become visible in stronger relationships, wider access, and greater capacity for participants to act together.
The task includes building useful structures, recognizing obstructions, and supporting the exchanges through which a community adapts and replenishes itself.
What might become possible if we measured our contribution by the connections that flourish, the resources that circulate, and the capacity that grows throughout the ecosystem?
Academic references
Cohen, W. M., & Levinthal, D. A. (1990). Absorptive capacity: A new perspective on learning and innovation. Administrative Science Quarterly, 35(1), 128–152. https://doi.org/10.2307/2393553
Dhanaraj, C., & Parkhe, A. (2006). Orchestrating innovation networks. Academy of Management Review, 31(3), 659–669. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2006.21318923
Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360–1380. https://doi.org/10.1086/225469
Hargadon, A., & Sutton, R. I. (1997). Technology brokering and innovation in a product development firm. Administrative Science Quarterly, 42(4), 716–749. https://doi.org/10.2307/2393655
Spigel, B. (2017). The relational organization of entrepreneurial ecosystems. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 41(1), 49–72. https://doi.org/10.1111/etap.12167
Spigel, B., & Harrison, R. (2018). Toward a process theory of entrepreneurial ecosystems. Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, 12(1), 151–168. https://doi.org/10.1002/sej.1268
Stam, E., & van de Ven, A. (2021). Entrepreneurial ecosystem elements. Small Business Economics, 56, 809–832. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-019-00270-6
Uhl-Bien, M., Marion, R., & McKelvey, B. (2007). Complexity leadership theory: Shifting leadership from the industrial age to the knowledge era. The Leadership Quarterly, 18(4), 298–318. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2007.04.002
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