Ecosystem is more about biology than engineering - exiang/startup-resources GitHub Wiki

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZLZIFL5rsM

Visitors to Silicon Valley often wonder how to build something like it back home, just as an engineer might seek to build a skyscraper. Byt the answer is not about engineering. It is about biology. We must think of its people as a living biology system, not the sum of its individual components. We have name this biology system the Rainforest.

Biology systems emerge from evolution, not engineering, and evolutions comes from experimenting, iterating, tinkering, mutation and natural selection - through a process of trial and error.

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In the efforts to grow Rainforests in new markets, all approaches that do not focus on cultural transformation are doomed to fail.

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The rainforest concept does not come naturally to many leaders. With elections around the corner or quarterly earnings to be announced, leaders most often strive to define and control outcomes. Innovation, however, is serendipitous. Leader in the Rainforest must learn to engineer serendipity, not outcomes. Their primary weapons in this fight are the bridging of social barriers, the building of trust, and the adoption of the Rules. These are not slogans that win elections or lead to fast promotions, but they are vital for success in the long run.

  1. Innovation comes not from the basic ingredients of economic production, but from the way that people interrelate to combine and share ideas, talent and capital. A community that facilitates such relationships is a biological system we call a Rainforest. Its animating process is creative reassembly.

  2. Certain individuals and organizations we call "keystones" have the special ability to integrate disparate people, influencing them to act in ways that impact the entire system. They glue people together in the Rainforest.

  3. People do not connect easily. Social barriers - based on geography, social networks, language, culture and distrust -- create transaction costs that prevent people from finding each other and working together. Human beings are wired to distrust one another.

  4. A system can overcome barriers to human collaboration when people are motivated by extra-rational motivations and when transaction are less costly due to social norms we call the Rules of the Rainforest.

  5. The rainforest recipe demonstrates how such system are constructed, based on diversity, trust, motivations, and norms. Diversity is enhanced by mixing people from different social groups. Cultural behavior is learned through the Rainforest Tools: real-world practice, role modelling, peer-to-peer interaction, social feedback loops, networks of trust, and making norms explicit through social contracts.

  6. Capital must be designed as a service integrated into the Rainforest, not as an end in itself. It must be part of the social fabric, not distinct from it.

  7. We measure the health of a Rainforest by watching the waves, not just the atom or the overall ocean. The flow-form model -- based on robust biological systems emphasizes the velocity of ideas, capital and talent flowing in a system. Lowering social barriers is like opening arteries to accelerate their flow.

from The Rainforest by Victor W. Hwang