When you think about creating the right conditions for an innovation community, capability or culture to grow inside a non-profit, a non-governmental organization, a governmental organization, or a corporation the first thing that I think is important is to understand the ecosystem.

Well, ok, what is an ecosystem in the first place – I’m going to reference Wikipedia again as I will often do in my posts, because when you’re talking about crowdsourcing, it never hurts to reference one of the most famous examples.  So, again, what is an ecosystem?  Well, let’s start with a picture.

According to Wikipedia, an ecosystem is:

a biological environment consisting of all the organisms living in a particular area, as well as all the nonliving, physical components of the environment with which the organisms interact, such as air, soil, water and sunlight.^[1]

I think this is a useful metaphor to use in describing a human organization as well.  A human organization is an environment consisting of all the employees in a particular logical grouping, as well as all the physical assets, financial assets, idea assets, process assets, and technology assets of the environment with which the employees interact, such as dollars, computers, telephones, collaboration communities, org charts, management and leadership.

Similarly, ideas exist in their own particular ecosystem and have their own organic life as well.  An idea ecosystem is very similar to a human organization ecosystem with the exception that the ideas are the organism and the humans are actually one of the physical assets that the ideas interact with.  This may seem like a leap, but, ideas have a life of their own, are capable of growth, impact and influence their environment and the resources within it and can evolve.  Ideas are organisms in their own way.