In 1935, English botanist Arthur Tansley coined the term “ecosystem” to describe our emerging understanding that a biological system operates as an interlocking series of species. You can’t remove the rubber trees without affecting the fruit flies and the tree frogs and the jaguars and so on.
This was extended as a metaphor to describe “business ecosystems” by Jim Moore in a 1993 Harvard Business Review article and his subsequent book “The Death of Competition.” Silicon Valley types liked how “ecosystem” described what seemed especially true of their emerging tech community: Big corporates needed employees who socialized together and startups that piloted inventive approaches with a buzz of service providers.
Without the fruit fly, so to speak, northern California wouldn’t become Silicon Valley.
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