Defining Innovation Ecosystems: The NorthGuide Perspective

By: Iain Klugman & Avvey Peters

Let’s play word association.

When we say “innovation ecosystem,” what pops into your mind? Startups? Tech? Incubators? Venture capital? Or maybe, fancy business jargon?

While those things are often found in innovation ecosystems (hopefully, not too much of the last one), they are just that – components.?

An ecosystem, as the term makes clear, is a system. And when it comes to systems, one element transcends all the others:

Relationships.

The health of an ecosystem, in other words, is less about the components than how well their leaders work together, and the enthusiasm they bring to that work.?

We’ve come to know this based on our decades of work cultivating healthy ecosystems, first with Communitech in Waterloo Region, Ontario, and now with NorthGuide, the strategy firm we’ve launched to foster growth, innovation and positive change for organizations around the world.

We foster communities in which entrepreneurs, corporations, academic institutions, government and community-based organizations can collaborate for mutual benefit, and access the tools they need to succeed.?

Our experience has led us to come up with this working definition for “innovation ecosystem”:

A community of people working together to solve problems and improve life through new goods, services and ways of doing things.

We’ve left out the tech-centric terminology you’d expect to find in such a definition, not because we don’t love tech (we do!), but because there’s a lot more to a healthy ecosystem than the tech companies often found at its heart.

That “lot more” ultimately depends on people with diverse interests being able to come together, find common cause, trust each other and make good things happen.

In Waterloo Region, we deployed this approach time and again over close to two decades. We built coalitions of people from industry, government and academia and rallied them to spur economic growth, innovation and positive change in our community. In that time, Waterloo climbed out of relative obscurity and onto Startup Genome’s list of the world’s top ecosystems, and as an anchor of the Toronto-Waterloo corridor.

As word of our success spread, ecosystem builders from a list of countries as varied as Denmark and India to Brazil and Australia came to see what they might learn. Often, they would ask if we had a playbook they could use to replicate our success in their communities.

We were always happy to help, but these requests for explicit instructions highlighted a messy truth about innovation ecosystems: They can’t be duplicated, because each one evolves from its own set of local ingredients – everything from its entrepreneurial history and geography to its educational institutions and cultural norms. Put another way, they are complex adaptive systems, as Brad Feld and Ian Hathaway expressed so well in their 2020 book, The Startup Community Way.

That said, there are many actions innovation leaders can take to gather their local ingredients, refine their mission, foster the right relationships and build the kind of trust-based coalitions that bring about positive results for their communities.

We’ve launched NorthGuide for that reason: to apply what we learned from building the Waterloo ecosystem to helping purpose-driven organizations, wherever they are in the world, to find success through solid strategy, expert execution and smart advice.

To that end, we’ve built a network of experts and leaders with decades of hands-on innovation experience with government, industry and ecosystem support organizations. Together, we know what works, what doesn’t, and how to turn strategy into impact.

In future posts, we’ll look at some of the ways ecosystems can tap into their unique strengths to compete more effectively with other jurisdictions, leverage government and corporate relationships to spur economic development, and more.

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to know more about how NorthGuide can help, please feel free to reach out.