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So far we’ve looked at the way in which the explosion of Cichlid species mirrors the explosion of tech companies in Silicon Valley and discovered that in both cases, there was an initial catalyst for evolutionary divergence followed by rapid speciation fuelled by intense competition resulting in exploitation of a wide variety of niches along but at the same time the need to protect your own innovations in order to avoid hostile mimicry and predatory tactics.  The questions now become:

1)       what do you do if your technology is no longer competitive within a particular niche?

2)      At the same time, if you are a start-up with a new and improved technology, how do you get it noticed amongst a sea of similar technologies?

3)      Finally, if you can’t get noticed straight away, can you still develop your business?

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Now for the Cichlid fish and Silicon Valley, this is where it starts to get really interesting.  For simplicities sake let’s say we now have to species of Cichlid fish, one whiling away its time in the pleasant yet increasingly over crowded sandy shallows and the other living in the rapidly changing rocky outcrops.  We also have two ’species’ of university one focused on traditional research reliant on government funding and contributions from its alumni to provide its food (funding), the other having formed a strategic relationship with defence organisations which provide it food so long as it can rapidly adapt to the changing circumstances.

Now at this point, although we have to distinct species, they have not evolved so much that it is no longer possible for them to interbreed, if the right circumstances exist.  Thus we have the occasional rocky fish getting it on with particularly sexy sandy fish and we have the occasional Harvard Professor going back to his sandy roots to make sweet love at Stanford.

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In this first instalment of this article, I am going to introduce you to one of the coolest fish families in the world, the Cichlids, a family made up of 1000s of brightly coloured little fish with just as many fascinating little quirks that make them ideally adapted to their own niche.  My aim is to see if we can draw any parallels between the mechanisms of rapid speciation in the Cichlid fishes and the explosion of tech companies in the Silicon Valley and whether this has anything to teach us from a network strategic management point of view (or more usefully, from the point of view of a tech start-up).

Darwin argued that all individuals struggle to survive on limited resources, but that there is variation amongst the population that gives some individuals traits which confer a competitive advantage over those that do not possess such traits.  Such individuals have higher evolutionary fitness and are thus more likely to survive to produce the next generation.

In their paper, Strategic Networks, Ranjay Gulati et al argue that ‘A key question in strategy research is why firms differ in their conduct and profitability’ and that the traditional view of firms as ‘atomistic actors competing for profits against each other in an impersonal market place is increasingly inadequate in a world in which firms are embedded in networks of social, professional, and exchange relationships with other organisational actors’ .  They go on to contend that ‘the conduct and performance of firms can be more fully understood by examining the networks of relationships in which they are embedded‘.

It is easy to draw a parallel here between the ‘networks of relationships’ in which a firm is embedded and the ecosystem in which an organism spends its life.  I propose that an evolutionary perspective can help explain the effect that the ecosystem within which a firm finds its self has on that firms conduct and likelihood of success.  To do this I will draw parallels between explosive speciation of the African cichlid fishes and the explosion of high tech companies in Silicon Valley.

Silicon and the Cichlids

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