Business Ecosystem Quotes

Each business is like a tree in the forest that is the economy. Each business is like a living being that exists within an ecosystem that also has a life of its own.

The business landscape is a constantly evolving ecosystem. Changes in the macro environment, such as technological disruptions or changing consumer preferences, can rapidly alter the competitive landscape. A high-performing board needs to be adept at strategic foresight.

Mayflower-Plymouth is a company, and it's an ecosystem. We are an Investment Holdings company that holds mostly small and medium sized businesses in our portfolio. And we also provide a variety of resources and business services such as consulting - in the interest of helping businesses to be better.

The way fungi and mycorrhizae direct nutrients in biological ecosystems is a case study for how we can direct resources within human economic systems. And in doing this, we cultivate a multitude of business opportunities.

Fungi broker resources between species via mycelium networks and in doing so they cultivate health and resilience for the entire ecosystem. In the same way, each business should cultivate health and resilience for the entire business ecosystem.

There are a multitude of benefits that arise when we use stigmergic coordination for collective benefit in our business ecosystems.

Fungi protect the ecosystem they inhabit through complex symbiotic relationships. We can design a system whereby businesses protect the business ecosystem through complex symbiohtic relationships.

The sum of global business activity should actually add value to natural ecosystems.

Mayflower-Plymouth is not only a company, it's also an ecosystem.

Businesses want to plug into the Mayflower-Plymouth ecosystem because in this ecosystem, good businesses become better.

In closed loop systems, flow facilitates flow and liquidity facilitates liquidity. Rainforests dont run out of water because of the cycles and relationships between the elements in the rainforest ecosystem. Business ecosystems can facilitate liquidity in the same way.

Can we train an AI to exist in service to the efficiency of a business ecosystem? I'd like to explore that possibility.

An economy is an ecosystem of business activities.

Ecosystems blur the lines of fixed business models. In a digital, dematerialized, disintermediated world, there are no direct competitors.

Similar to living organisms, these living BMaaS (Business Models-as-a-System) have an innate capacity to change creatively within their ecosystems, as they emerge and unfold. Change is expected, organic, and constant.

The same way biodiversity is important to biological ecosystems, business diversity is important to economic ecosystems. It's good to have an abundance of various kinds of businesses. This cultivates resilience in the system.

Everyone deserves to have a good job that they love, that adds value to an economic ecosystem, and that pays a good salary.

Everything we need to know about upcycling, we can learn from fungi.

In nature, distribution is immersive and not linear. Think about the distribution of water in natural ecosystems. That’s what distribution in business ecosystems needs to be like.

Municipalities that foster thriving business ecosystems can issue more investable bonds.

A business that doesn’t respect human life, animal life and the ecosystem of our planet earth… that’s a business we don’t want in our portfolio. If the business does more harm than good, facilitates more death than life, and causes more destruction than creation… then we view them as a bad investment.

Let's put heterogeneity over homogeneity. We need to design materials that can restore or rewild biodiversity on the planet. When ecosystems are more diverse, they are better able to perform essential ecosystem services like carbon sequestration.

Ecosystems have the power to positively disrupt economic systems. BMaaS (Business Models-as-a-System) harness open ecosystems as a complex set of interacting relationships and networks. The stronger these relationships, the more resilient the systems.

Fungi are decentralized intelligence networks. They send information multi-directionally, they constantly evolve and adapt based on feedback from their environment, they invent new molecules to collaborate... And they form a decentralized consensus on how to utilize resources, when to reproduce and what strategies to employ. This is how businesses and business ecosystems should be.

When you put your business' roots into the Mayflower network, you're plugging into a network based on permaculture design principles. Our ecosystem is unique and our ecosystem offers unique value.

They were part of a forest, an ecosystem that is perfect because of its wide variety of species, dominant because nothing is not allowed to be there. In the forest, everything that is inclined to thrive really does, and has a job, and some jobs are to grow things up and some jobs are to take things apart and everything is accepted because there is no notion—among bacteria and moss and busy mice—there is no notion of who deserves to do something or be in a place. There are only lives to be lived, and they are everywhere.

In regard to the health of planet Earth, business should be a value adder. The sum of global business activity should actually add value to natural ecosystems.

Bartering is a common practice in natural ecosystems.

Managing waste is a really bad goal. Only an inefficient system would aim to manage waste. A better goal is making waste non-existent by designing the system itself, through it's participants, to continually upcycle resources.

If there's a lack of trust in an economic system, it introduces additional costs into the system. And those costs are shared among all participants in the economic ecosystem. So that's why trust is important.

The same way trees add value to the natural environment, businesses should add value to the natural environment. It's not about just co-existing; it's about co-thriving.

When we apply the design principles of permaculture to economics, we end up with an economic ecosystem where every participant adds to and benefits from maximized productivity.

The real potential of Web3 is in allowing businesses and people to collectively function more similarly to biological ecosystems.

In natural ecosystems, the primary role of the mycelium network is the allocation of capital. That's how the mycelium network helps facilitate the success of all other participants in the ecosystem. At Mayflower-Plymouth, we're doing the same thing in business ecosystems.

If we want a circular economy; a permaculture economy - we need to design decay into products and processes as opposed to disposability. Manufacturers should design materials and products to programmatically biodegrade back into an economic ecosystem. This will allow for more efficient upcycling and the cultivation of various business opportunities in the process.

Biopolymers have huge business implications. They add cyclicality to the economic ecosystem, therefore making possible new business opportunities that didn't exist before, and allowing those businesses to have a healthy relationship with the natural environment at the same time.

In the Permaculture Economics model, businesses enhance ecosystems, rather than degrading them.

The idea is that businesses that are plugged into the Mayflower-Plymouth ecosystem should have competitive and comparative advantages over non members in their respective markets.

Biomimicry is critical in regard to using design as a way to solve problems in business. Biological ecosystems have invented solution after solution to all kinds of problems. The key is to learn to see nature through nature's eyes, and to speak nature's language and then to establish a continuous translation between biological ecosystems and human ecosystems.

It's interesting that economy and ecosystem share a root prefix — eco; which is defined as relating to ecology. And ecology is defined as dealing with the relations of organisms to one another and to their surroundings. Swap out the word organisms for the word businesses and you can see how economies and ecosystems have a lot in common.

Your website is the center of your digital eco-system, like a brick and mortar location, the experience matters once a customer enters, just as much as the perception they have of you before they walk through the door.

Permaculture Economics views businesses as interconnected parts of a larger ecosystem. By understanding and optimizing these relationships, companies can create positive feedback loops that benefit not only their bottom line but also the environment, their communities, and society as a whole.

Seventy thousand years ago, Homo sapiens was still an insignificant animal minding its own business in a corner of Africa. In the following millennia it transformed itself into the master of the entire planet and the terror of the ecosystem. Today it stands on the verge of becoming a god, poised to acquire not only eternal youth, but also the divine abilities of creation and destruction.

When you're buying from me and I'm buying from you and we're all buying from each other, there's flow within the ecosystem. And businesses in our ecosystem can tap into a portion of that flow to facilitate liquidity for their specific business.

At Mayflower-Plymouth, we pair our deep understanding of business and economies with our study of natural ecosystems to invest in productive assets across the globe. We aim to help our clients employ capital and maximize ROI by combining fundamental asset selection with proprietary methodologies based on modeling natural ecosystems.

As all these trends happen, the winners will be those who are able to participate fully in innovation-driven ecosystems by providing new ideas, business models, products and services, rather than those who can offer only low-skilled labour or ordinary capital.

The intricate networks of ecosystems teach us the importance of building strong supply chains and partnerships.

Permaculture economics promotes diversity, just like nature's ecosystems, and this contributes to long-term prosperity.

Permaculture economics prioritizes fairness, justice, and equity, like nature's balanced ecosystems.

A business ecosystem is just like the natural ecosystem; first, needs to be understood, then, needs to be well planned, and also needs to be thoughtfully renewed as well.

Innovation happens at the intersection of people, process, technology, customers, and business ecosystem.

You need a healthy, thriving self-employed ecosystem. An ecosystem that integrates the three main elements of self-employed success--personal development, business strategies, and daily habit.

When people love they work they do, and the work they do adds value to the economic ecosystem, and they're getting paid a good salary for that — there's a multiplicative value effect. We all win.

When Private Equity is approached from an ecosystem perspective, businesses in the portfolio can be led to create multiplicative value effects; with other businesses in the portfolio being primary additional beneficiaries, thereby amplifying profitability among several the businesses in the ecosystem.

At Mayflower-Plymouth, we analyze global markets, analyze businesses and employ a range of strategies that emulate natural ecosystems to deliver holistic and industry-consistent investment returns. Our approach emphasizes preservation, steady compounding growth and steady returns for our capital partners and clients.

The best ones to solve the climate change problem are businesses all around the world. If each business adapts permaculture principles, we would see massive improvements in climate and natural ecosystem conditions.

In natural ecosystems, the efficient allocation of capital is a prerequisite for all other success metrics. The same is true of economic systems. The efficient allocation of capital is a prerequisite for all other success metrics.

In so many places, we are so busy playing at being stewards of the Earth, deciding who gets to live and who gets to die. Once we have left our mark on an ecosystem, we show no hesitation in throwing open the hood again later to fiddle with its workings. We run the Earth as if it were one giant botanical garden to tend; passing judgment on species, playing God. I

Its important to acknowledge inter-dependence in economic ecosystems. But I think it's also important to emphasize inter-value-adding. So in addition to acknowledging our need for each other, we should also emphasize the ways that we add value to each other. The former promotes necessary appreciation for others. And the latter promotes necessary sense of self worth. And that's a good balance.

No company exists in a vacuum; each is part of an ecosystem.

At Mayflower-Plymouth, we look at the businesses in our Private Equity portfolio as an ecosystem of businesses.

Capital leveraging is something that takes place in natural ecosystems. For example, the trees leverage capital in service to the birds.

middle managers were necessary to a business in the same way that mosquitos were necessary to a functional ecosystem. They would both have no noticeable impact if they were removed.

The music industry is a great case study for how value can ripple out through an economic ecosystem and how compensation for that value ripples back to the originators of that value.

A large tree cannnot sustain itself without the support of an ecosystem of various sized life forms. In the same way, large companies cannot sustain themselves without an ecosystem of various sized companies.

When you're thinking about where is the best place to start a business, there's a lot to consider - It's about culture, it's about physical infrastructure, it's about how educated the people are, it's about the housing, it's about the natural ecosystem, it's about the regulatory and legal frameworks, it's about the local transportation system and the efficiency of all the other systems that are there. But location matters.

Commercial loans serve various purposes, from financing expansion and working capital to equipment acquisition and real estate investment – They’re a very important part of the capital ecosystem of the world, and of its individual nations.

SEVENTY THOUSAND YEARS AGO, HOMO sapiens was still an insignificant animal minding its own business in a corner of Africa. In the following millennia it transformed itself into the master of the entire planet and the terror of the ecosystem.

What works to generate flows of new leads: Trial-and-error in lead generation (requires patience, experimentation, money). “Marketing through teaching” via regular webinars, white papers, email newsletters and live events, to establish yourself as the trusted expert in your space (takes lots of time to build predictable momentum). Patience in building great word-of-mouth (the highest value lead generation source, but hardest to influence). Cold Calling 2.0: By far the most predictable and controllable source of creating new pipeline, but it takes focus and expertise to do it well. Luckily, you are holding the guide to the process in your hands right now. Building an excited partner ecosystem (very high value, very long time-to-results). PR: It’s great when, once in awhile, it generates actual results!

As director Brad Bird sees it, every creative organization—be it an animation studio or a record label—is an ecosystem. “You need all the seasons,” he says. “You need storms. It’s like an ecology. To view lack of conflict as optimum is like saying a sunny day is optimum. A sunny day is when the sun wins out over the rain. There’s no conflict. You have a clear winner. But if every day is sunny and it doesn’t rain, things don’t grow.

As a person, Janice is of course more than her house; but it is also true that her house is an indicator of what it feels like to be Janice. And what it feels like to be Janice is to be asphyxiating, slowly and helplessly, under the crushing and ever-multiplying weight of the past and the present. I picture her here on this couch, curled into herself like a fern at 4 a.m. And though it must feel like a catacomb in that dark hour, and though every hour behind these blinds has been dark, the house is spinning with movement: mould is travelling up and down the walls, food is rotting, cans are rusting, water is dripping, insects are being born and they are living and dying, Janice's hair is growing, her heart is beating, she is breathing. Which is to say that this, too, is life. Like the creatures that swim in the perfect blackness of the ocean floor, the ecosystem here would be unrecognisable to most people but this, too, is our world. The Order of Things includes those who are excluded.

In natural ecosystems, the way the waste of one is turned into a resource for another is through systematic value added consumption. In human economic systems, waste is only a problem insofaras systematic value added consumption has not been holistically applied. So, the way to prevent waste is to have it exist in a system where the waste of one is viewed as a product for value added consumption by another. The way to prevent waste is to consider full lifecycle consumption during the design of materials and products and then ensure that for everything produced there exists a mechanism of value added consumption and an audience which will perceive the consumption of it as adding value to their lives. It must be value added consumption because people only voluntarily consume that which they deem to add value to their own lives. And it must be systematic because no amount of accumulated waste is acceptable. When the consumption of ones waste is perceived to be a value add to others, and those others are able to efficiently consume it, a system will organically emerge whereby in essence, the concept of waste is nullified.

It shouldn't be here. This sedge grass is decorative bullshit he imported from Northern Asia. The lab spent two years modifying it to slot into our ecosystem, all so that the mountain would literally smell of honey. Terra di latte e miele, she said, mockingly. Thank god my father went into business, not poetry. He's far too much of a romantic. I laughed, incredulous at this portrait of my stiff employer, and Aida reddened. It is romantic, if you think about it. He planted the grass for my mother. She's one of those Catholic Koreans, painfully devout. You know. The promised land, Canaan, found after forty years of wandering the desert. The land of milk and honey.

What works to generate flows of new leads: Trial-and-error in lead generation (requires patience, experimentation, money). “Marketing through teaching” via regular webinars, white papers, email newsletters and live events, to establish yourself as the trusted expert in your space (takes lots of time to build predictable momentum). Patience in building great word-of-mouth (the highest value lead generation source, but hardest to influence). Outbound Prospecting (aka "Cold Calling 2.0"):: By far the most predictable and controllable source of creating new pipeline, but it takes focus and expertise to do it well. Luckily, you are holding the guide to the process in your hands right now. Building an excited partner ecosystem (very high value, very long time-to-results). PR: It’s great when, once in a while, it generates actual results!

SEVENTY THOUSAND YEARS AGO, HOMO sapiens was still an insignificant animal minding its own business in a corner of Africa. In the following millennia it transformed itself into the master of the entire planet and the terror of the ecosystem. Today it stands on the verge of becoming a god, poised to acquire not only eternal youth, but also the divine abilities of creation and destruction. Unfortunately, the Sapiens regime on earth has so far produced little that we can be proud of. We have mastered our surroundings, increased food production, built cities, established empires and created far-flung trade networks. But did we decrease the amount of suffering in the world? Time and again, massive increases in human power did not necessarily improve the well-being of individual Sapiens, and usually caused immense misery to other animals. In the last few decades we have at last made some real progress as far as the human condition is concerned, with the reduction of famine, plague and war. Yet the situation of other animals is deteriorating more rapidly than ever before, and the improvement in the lot of humanity is too recent and fragile to be certain of. Moreover, despite the astonishing things that humans are capable of doing, we remain unsure of our goals and we seem to be as discontented as ever. We have advanced from canoes to galleys to steamships to space shuttles – but nobody knows where we’re going. We are more powerful than ever before, but have very little idea what to do with all that power. Worse still, humans seem to be more irresponsible than ever. Self-made gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company, we are accountable to no one. We are consequently wreaking havoc on our fellow animals and on the surrounding ecosystem, seeking little more than our own comfort and amusement, yet never finding satisfaction. Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?

Seventy thousand years ago, homo sapiens was still an insignificant animal minding its own business in a corner of Africa. In the following millennia it transformed itself into the master of the entire planet and the terror of the ecosystem. Today it stands on the verge of becoming a god, poised to acquire not only eternal youth, but also the divine abilities of creation and destruction. . Unfortunately, the Sapiens regime on earth has so far produced little that we can be proud of. We have mastered our surroundings, increased food production, built cities, established empires and created far-flung trade networks. But did we decrease the amount of suffering in the world? Time and again, massive increases in human power did not necessarily improve the well-being of individual Sapiens, and usually caused immense misery to other animals. . In the last few decades we have at last made some real progress as far as the human condition is concerned, with the reduction of famine, plague and war. Yet the situation of other animals is deteriorating more rapidly than ever before, and the improvement in the lot of humanity is too recent and fragile to be certain of. . Moreover, despite the astonishing things that humans are capable of doing, we remain unsure of our goals and we seem to be as discontented as ever. We have advanced from canoes to galleys to steamships to space shuttles – but nobody knows where we’re going. We are more powerful than ever before, but have very little idea what to do with all that power. Worse still, humans seem to be more irresponsible than ever. Self-made gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company, we are accountable to no one. We are consequently wreaking havoc on our fellow animals and on the surrounding ecosystem, seeking little more than our own comfort and amusement, yet never finding satisfaction. . Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?

The only word these corporations know is more,” wrote Chris Hedges, former correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, and the New York Times. They are disemboweling every last social service program funded by the taxpayers, from education to Social Security, because they want that money themselves. Let the sick die. Let the poor go hungry. Let families be tossed in the street. Let the unemployed rot. Let children in the inner city or rural wastelands learn nothing and live in misery and fear. Let the students finish school with no jobs and no prospects of jobs. Let the prison system, the largest in the industrial world, expand to swallow up all potential dissenters. Let torture continue. Let teachers, police, firefighters, postal employees and social workers join the ranks of the unemployed. Let the roads, bridges, dams, levees, power grids, rail lines, subways, bus services, schools and libraries crumble or close. Let the rising temperatures of the planet, the freak weather patterns, the hurricanes, the droughts, the flooding, the tornadoes, the melting polar ice caps, the poisoned water systems, the polluted air increase until the species dies. There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave. To be declared innocent in a country where the rule of law means nothing, where we have undergone a corporate coup, where the poor and working men and women are reduced to joblessness and hunger, where war, financial speculation and internal surveillance are the only real business of the state, where even habeas corpus no longer exists, where you, as a citizen, are nothing more than a commodity to corporate systems of power, one to be used and discarded, is to be complicit in this radical evil. To stand on the sidelines and say “I am innocent” is to bear the mark of Cain; it is to do nothing to reach out and help the weak, the oppressed and the suffering, to save the planet. To be innocent in times like these is to be a criminal.

We chose not to discuss a world warmed beyond two degrees out of decency, perhaps; or simple fear; or fear of fearmongering; or technocratic faith, which is really market faith; or deference to partisan debates or even partisan priorities; or skepticism about the environmental Left of the kind I'd always had; or disinterest in the fates of distant ecosystems like I'd also always had. We felt confusion about the science and its many technical terms and hard-to-parse numbers, or at least an intuition that others would e easily confused about the science and its many technical terms and hard-to-parse numbers. we suffered from slowness apprehending the speed of change, or semi-conspiratorial confidence in the responsibility of global elites and their institutions, or obeisance toward those elites and their institutions, whatever we thought of them. Perhaps we felt unable to really trust scarier projections because we'd only just heard about warming, we thought, and things couldn't possibly have gotten that much worse just since the first Inconvenient Truth; or because we liked driving our cars and eating our beef and living as we did in every other way and didn't want to think too hard about that; or because we felt so "postindustrial" we couldn't believe we were still drawing material breaths from fossil fuel furnaces. Perhaps it was because we were so sociopathically good at collating bad news into a sickening evolving sense of what constituted "normal," or because we looked outside and things seemed still okay. Because we were bored with writing, or reading, the same story again and again, because climate was so global and therefore nontribal it suggested only the corniest politics, because we didn't yet appreciate how fully it would ravage our lives, and because, selfishly, we didn't mind destroying the planet for others living elsewhere on it or those not yet born who would inherit it from us, outraged. Because we had too much faith in the teleological shape of history and the arrow of human progress to countenance the idea that the arc of history would bend toward anything but environmental justice, too. Because when we were being really honest with ourselves we already thought of the world as a zero-sum resource competition and believed that whatever happened we were probably going to continue to be the victors, relatively speaking anyway, advantages of class being what they are and our own luck in the natalist lottery being what it was. Perhaps we were too panicked about our own jobs and industries to fret about the future of jobs and industry; or perhaps we were also really afraid of robots or were too busy looking at our new phones; or perhaps, however easy we found the apocalypse reflex in our culture and the path of panic in our politics, we truly had a good-news bias when it came to the big picture; or, really, who knows why-there are so many aspects to the climate kaleidoscope that transforms our intuitions about environmental devastation into n uncanny complacency that it can be hard to pull the whole picture of climate distortion into focus. But we simply wouldn't, or couldn't, or anyway didn't look squarely in the face of science.

The destruction of breastfeeding threatens our ecosystem as much as over-fishing, over-grazing or forest destruction.

In the solution economy, the winning approach is to capitalize on your role in a broader ecosystem. If a problem exists, the answer is to create an environment in which the solution can organically, sustainably, profitably be brought to bear—even if there is no market demand in the traditional sense. Sound impossible? Well, that’s exactly what Unilever did in India to address a critical public sanitation problem. How the company did it demonstrates the role that ecosystems play in the solution revolution.

The digital ecosystem provides unprecedented opportunities to strike a dynamic balance between the inner and outer elements, and leapfrog the business world up to the next level of advancement.

The digital organization is a living thing with the ability to continually change as the world changes and evolves with an intersecting and interacting business ecosystem seamlessly.

I recently visited New Zealand and learned that it has a very diverse ecosystem. Until the arrival of humans, it was populated almost entirely by birds. They occupied every niche in the food chain, from tiny ɻightless things to predators so enormous they could snatch a hundred-pound prey for dinner. For millions of years, birds dominated their man-less, mammal-less world, a universe of feathers, beaks, and talons, knowing of no other form of higher life. The birds acquired a host of abilities and natural defenses optimal for their environment. But then in the thirteenth century, while the Europeans were still busy with their crusades, Polynesian explorers came, and with them came rats—with fur instead of feathers, teeth instead of beaks, and tiny paws instead of fearsome talons. The defense mechanisms that worked well against other birds failed against the rats. Small ɻightless birds who, when sensing danger, would remain perfectly still to avoid being spotted by predators ɻying overhead, would do the same when encountering a rat. Fighting for its life, in its passive way, the little bird focused its every eʃort on not moving a single muscle—only to be gobbled up where it stood. The scientific term for animals like the little bird who had not encountered rats or humans is naïve. I find this charming, as if the little bird existed in a moral universe of which his New Zealand was a kind of Eden, its inhabitants living a peaceful existence disrupted only by the victimization of a cunning intruder, preying on their relative innocence. I often think the people I encounter are naïve, but only because they may never have encountered someone quite like me. Sociopaths see things that no one else does because they have diʃerent expectations about the world and the people in it. While you and observer from certain harsh truths, the sociopath remains undistracted. We are like rats on an island of birds. I have never identified with the little bird, trapped by fear and an instinct for passivity, the wide-eyed victim of circumstance. I have never pined for an Eden of peace on earth and goodwill toward men. I am the rat, and I will take every advantage I can without apology or excuse. And there are others like me.

if your business ecosystem seems stable, don't be lulled into a potentially false sense of security. Big changes can happen very quickly. Don't confuse low volatility with low risk. Andy Grove, former Intel CEO, was fond of saying "Only the paranoid survive." These are wise words. Models used in business often do very well in periods of stability, but fail miserably in times of sudden changes. They work well when you don't need them and fail when you need them the most.

In the industrial age, scale is the result of what a firm does by itself using the assets that it controls and the units it produces. In the digital world, scale is the result of what it may produce by itself plus what it can achieve with its partners in the ecosystem. Tap into the scale advantage conferred by your ecosystems. Just like scale, scope advantage in the digital world comes through being part of an ecosystem.

The costs of coordinating labor and resources toward value creation are declining rapidly as new coordination tools enable a distributed ecosystem to work together to create value.

This book is a compilation of interesting ideas that have strongly influenced my thoughts and I want to share them in a compressed form. That ideas can change your worldview and bring inspiration and the excitement of discovering something new. The emphasis is not on the technology because it is constantly changing. It is much more difficult to change the accompanying circumstances that affect the way technological solutions are realized. The chef did not invent salt, pepper and other spices. He just chooses good ingredients and uses them skilfully, so others can enjoy his art. If I’ve been successful, the book creates a new perspective for which the selection of ingredients is important, as well as the way they are smoothly and efficiently arranged together. In the first part of the book, we follow the natural flow needed to create the stimulating environment necessary for the survival of a modern company. It begins with challenges that corporations are facing, changes they are, more or less successfully, trying to make, and the culture they are trying to establish. After that, we discuss how to be creative, as well as what to look for in the innovation process. The book continues with a chapter that talks about importance of inclusion and purpose. This idea of inclusion – across ages, genders, geographies, cultures, sexual orientation, and all the other areas in which new ways of thinking can manifest – is essential for solving new problems as well as integral in finding new solutions to old problems. Purpose motivates people for reaching their full potential. This is The second and third parts of the book describes the areas that are important to support what is expressed in the first part. A flexible organization is based on IT alignment with business strategy. As a result of acceleration in the rate of innovation and technological changes, markets evolve rapidly, products’ life cycles get shorter and innovation becomes the main source of competitive advantage. Business Process Management (BPM) goes from task-based automation, to process-based automation, so automating a number of tasks in a process, and then to functional automation across multiple processes andeven moves towards automation at the business ecosystem level. Analytics brought us information and insight; AI turns that insight into superhuman knowledge and real-time action, unleashing new business models, new ways to build, dream, and experience the world, and new geniuses to advance humanity faster than ever before. Companies and industries are transforming our everyday experiences and the services we depend upon, from self-driving cars, to healthcare, to personal assistants. It is a central tenet for the disruptive changes of the 4th Industrial Revolution; a revolution that will likely challenge our ideas about what it means to be a human and just might be more transformative than any other industrial revolution we have seen yet. Another important disruptor is the blockchain - a distributed decentralized digital ledger of transactions with the promise of liberating information and making the economy more democratic. You no longer need to trust anyone but an algorithm. It brings reliability, transparency, and security to all manner of data exchanges: financial transactions, contractual and legal agreements, changes of ownership, and certifications. A quantum computer can simulate efficiently any physical process that occurs in Nature. Potential (long-term) applications include pharmaceuticals, solar power collection, efficient power transmission, catalysts for nitrogen fixation, carbon capture, etc. Perhaps we can build quantum algorithms for improving computational tasks within artificial intelligence, including sub-fields like machine learning. Perhaps a quantum deep learning network can be trained more efficiently, e.g. using a smaller training set. This is still in conceptual research domain.

As most new businesses fail, saying start-ups have a very high rate of failure is by itself not particularly revelatory. But a start-up is not a small business. A start-up is designed from the beginning to either become very big or completely fail—the modern-day equivalent of an uncertain, cross-ocean voyage to the New World as opposed to, say, a predictable, moderately profitable seventeenth-century trading voyage from London to Amsterdam. Stakeholders in a start-up are more interested in increasing the potential magnitude of a spectacular outcome than in bettering the probability of modest returns. Thus, the financial ecosystem’s willingness to accept a high risk of capital loss made venture capital accessible to outliers and eccentrics.

They may even have the potential to change the basis of competition in the home space by developing new and different ways of getting compensated—by creating entirely new and potentially radically different business models. For example, a cloud player offering comfort and security as a service may choose to bundle that service with other cloud services—or even subsidize one service with the proceeds from the other. They may also choose to bring other revenue sources like data collection or advertising into the mix in an effort to offer customers a better price point. All of this would put more traditional players at an extreme disadvantage.

Avoid incrementalism You can't take baby steps. In every aspect of how you approach your ecosystem business, you need to be ready to make big, ambitious moves. First, aim high in terms of the value proposition you are looking to deliver. Second, be ambitious in terms of the partnerships you pursue and how you structure those relationships. And, third, be ambitious in terms of developing, fostering, growing, and maintaining the ecosystem.

Presently, foundational resources essential to cutting-edge AI research and development like compute power, datasets, development frameworks and pre-trained models, remain overwhelmingly centralized under the control of Amazon, Microsoft, Google and several other giants who operate the dominant cloud computing platforms. Open source efforts cannot truly flourish or compete if trapped within the confines of the Big Tech clouds and proprietary ecosystems.

MANY YEARS AGO, I had joined the local news desk of a prominent newspaper in Bengaluru, the sleepy south Indian town that became the country’s Silicon Valley. After trying my hand at crime reporting and general business journalism, I developed an interest in tracking technology. Among other things in the mid noughties, I had half a page in the paper to feature new gadgets every week. Nokia, Blackberry, Samsung and a few other companies were regulars on the page. While I was enjoying my work, my salary needed a boost. (The media industry’s decline was just about beginning, and salaries were as poor then as they are today.) Getting out of the rather difficult circumstances that I found myself in, I moved on to the Economic Times to report on technology. The business daily was India’s largest pink paper by circulation, and I worked with some of the best journalists of the time. My job was mainly to write about technology services companies. Soon I got bored with tracking quarterly results and rehearsed statements. This was around 2012, and India’s start-up ecosystem was in its infancy. I quit the paper to join a start-up blog. I didn’t ask for a raise. I was just happy to be able to write about start-ups and their founders. It was something new, and their excitement was infectious. In those days, ‘start-up’ was not a mainstream beat in India. Only niche blogs wrote about them. On the personal front, there were months when I was flat broke. One evening I sold my old Nokia 5800 for ₹300 at a second-hand electronics shop to buy a packet of biryani. That is still the best biryani I’ve ever had. The two years at the start-up blog were also my best two years ever. As start-ups became the buzzword, I went back to the pink paper to write about them. I was able to upgrade my life a little. I moved into a middle-class apartment with my family. I got some furniture and so on. After selling the Nokia phone, I used a feature phone for a few days. But now I had to upgrade my phone. After much research, I zeroed in on a Micromax handset. Micromax, a Gurgaon-based company that began making handsets in 2008, had some smartphones that were affordable on a young journalist’s salary. It was also a leading brand and had some interesting features such as dual SIM and a great touchscreen display. Going from a phone that ran on Symbian (Nokia’s proprietary operating system that failed) to an Android-based phone was like suddenly being

In fact, following the narrative’s prescriptions seems to produce the opposite of the intended result: As more business plans are written, and as more local ecosystems are created, the number of startup businesses continues to fall.

Are you trying to solve customer experience problems without understanding your customer experience ecosystem? You might as well be air-dropping butterflies into Zion National Park. You’re going to spend a whole lot of money and end up right where you started.

As director Brad Bird sees it, every creative organization—be it an animation studio or a record label—is an ecosystem. “You need all the seasons,” he says. “You need storms. It’s like an ecology. To view lack of conflict as optimum is like saying a sunny day is optimum. A sunny day is when the sun wins out over the rain. There’s no conflict. You have a clear winner. But if every day is sunny and it doesn’t rain, things don’t grow. And if it’s sunny all the time—if, in fact, we don’t ever even have night—all kinds of things don’t happen and the planet dries up. The key is to view conflict as essential, because that’s how we know the best ideas will be tested and survive. You know, it can’t only be sunlight.

Modern biomimicry is far more than just copying nature's shapes. It includes systematic design and problem-solving processes, which are now being refined by scientists and engineers in universities and institutes worldwide. The first step in any of these processes is to clearly define the challenge we're trying to solve. Then we can determine whether the problem is related to form, function, or ecosystem. Next, we ask what plant, animal, or natural process solves a similar problem most effectively. For example, engineers trying to design a camera lens with the widest viewing angle possible found inspiration in the eyes of bees, which can see an incredible five-sixths of the way, or three hundred degrees, around their heads. The process can also work in reverse, where the exceptional strategies of a plant, animal, or ecosystem are recognized and reverse engineered. De Mestral's study of the tenacious grip of burrs on his socks is an early example of reverse engineering a natural winner, while researchers' fascination at the way geckos can hang upside down from the ceiling or climb vertical windows has now resulted in innovative adhesives and bandages. Designs based on biomimicry offer a range of economic benefits. Because nature has carried out trillions of parallel, competitive experiments for millions of years, its successful designs are dramatically more energy efficient than the inventions we've created in the past couple of hundred years. Nature builds only with locally derived materials, so it uses little transport energy. Its designs can be less expensive to manufacture than traditional approaches, because nature doesn't waste materials. For example, the exciting new engineering frontier of nanotechnology mirrors nature's manufacturing principles by building devices one molecule at a time. This means no offcuts or excess. Nature can't afford to poison itself either, so it creates and combines chemicals in a way that is nontoxic to its ecosystems. Green chemistry is a branch of biomimicry that uses this do-no-harm principle, to develop everything from medicines to cleaning products to industrial molecules that are safe by design. Learning from the way nature handles materials also allows one of our companies, PaxFan, to build fans that are smaller and lighter while giving higher performance. Finally, nature has methods to recycle absolutely everything it creates. In natures' closed loop of survival on this planet, everything is a resource and everything is recycled-one of the most fundamental components of sustainability. For all these reasons, as I hear one prominent venture capitalist declare, biomimicry will be the business of the twenty-first century. The global force of this emerging and fascinating field is undeniable and building on all societal levels.

The difference between predator and prey in a business ecosystem is determined by the strength of one’s next idea.

Most systems displaying a high degree of tolerance against failures are a common feature: Their functionality is guaranteed by a highly interconnected complex network. A cell's robustness is hidden in its intricate regulatory and metabolic network; society's resilience is rooted in the interwoven social web; the economy's stability is maintained by a delicate network of financial and regulator organizations; an ecosystem's survivability is encoded in a carefully crafted web of species interactions. It seems that nature strives to achieve robustness through interconnectivity. Such universal choice of a network architecture is perhaps more than mere coincidences.

Ecosystems are the key enablers of value creation on platforms and a new source of competitive advantage.

More typical, however, are tail-chasing proclamations like this one, which can be found on the website of the MIT Innovation Initiative: “The MIT Innovation Initiative is an Institute-wide, multi-year agenda to transform the Institute’s innovation ecosystem—internally, around the globe and with its partners—for accelerated impact well into the 21st century.”20 This sounds distinctly like bullshit, but if MIT wants to think of itself in such a way, that’s their business. The problem arises when we enshrine innovation as a public philosophy—when we look to it as the solution to our economic ills and understand it as the guide for how economies ought to parcel out rewards. To put it bluntly, it is not clear that cheering for innovation in the bombastic way we see in the blue states actually improves the economic well-being of average citizens. For example, the last fifteen years have been a golden age of financial and software innovation, but they have been feeble in terms of GDP growth. In ideological terms, however, innovation definitely works: as a way of excusing soaring inequality and explaining the exalted status of the rich, it is the best we’ve got.