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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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