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Developing business ideas for drone technologies
Developing business ideas for drone technologies

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1 Ecosystems in business and management

The word ecosystem is often associated with nature. The word itself stems from ecology and system: eco-system. In nature, an ecosystem is a collection of living things and the environment in which they live. The size and boundaries of an ecosystem, the bits to be studied, and the interactions to be investigated, are all determined by what we want to know. So an ecosystem can be large (a rainforest) or small (a pond). Large ecosystems can also often be broken down into a number of smaller ones. The important thing is that ecosystems are produced by living organisms interacting with each other and the physical environment (OpenLearn, 2019). Or in other words, ecosystems are systems that have within them other systems, which might in turn be embedded or overlapping with other systems.

Four photos showing different ecosystems
Figure 2 Four different habitats which can be individual ecosystems or groups of ecosystems. They may constitute different ways of understanding ecosystems

The concept of ecosystems has improved our understanding of phenomena in social science and in business management. After all, ‘no business is an island’ and business interactions are very important! Even entrepreneurs with groundbreaking new business ideas rely on other businesses and individuals to bring their ideas to market. Understanding business relationships and interconnections is very important for entrepreneurs, managers, business owners and policy makers.