Ecosystem Maturity and the Stepping-Stone Strategy

Introducing a new offering into an unripe ecosystem will doom your new venture. Instead, find a mini-ecosystem in which you can build a solution that works and use it as a steppingstone to reach your strategic goals. In this reprint of an article from the original Thinkers50 compilation, I’ll illustrate.

One of the great puzzles in business is why some entrepreneurs benefit tremendously from the unfolding of a strategic inflection point, while others who “saw” it equally clearly disappeared into the mists of forgotten business lore. One explanation is that introducing even prescient innovations into an unripe ecosystem is as much a recipe for disaster as failing to innovate in the face of a pending inflection point. Being ahead of one’s time is as miserable as being too late.

An analogy to natural ecosystems

James Moore, in a 1993 article, is often credited with popularizing the concept of a business ecosystem. Like a natural ecosystem, he suggested, businesses co-evolve, with the actions of one influencing others, just as the change in one species affects the habitat and can provoke changes in other species. For our purposes, a business ecosystem can be defined as having a number of definable components.