Not a company plus its customers — a network of separately-owned pieces whose success is coupled, whether or not any one of them planned it that way.
James Moore’s 1993 Harvard Business Review article gave the term its name, borrowing the biological metaphor deliberately: businesses, he argued, don’t compete as isolated firms but as members of loose communities of organizations — suppliers, customers, even competitors — whose fates rise and fall together around a shared innovation or platform, the way species share a habitat. Jacobides, Cennamo, and Gawer’s 2018 paper gave the concept its more rigorous modern treatment: an ecosystem is specifically a set of actors with varying degrees of multilateral, non-generic complementarity that is not fully hierarchically controlled — distinguishing it precisely from a supply chain (which is hierarchical) and a market (where participants aren’t interdependent).
That distinction is what makes “ecosystems” the right word for what this essay is reaching for when it says “what we need to do first is create ‘ecosystems.’” The models, tools, and integrations available around local AI — Ollama, open-weight models, the APIs that connect them to other software — only become valuable to a business as a coordinated whole, not as isolated pieces; asking “what is valuable to my business” is, in ecosystem terms, asking which complementary pieces to combine and around which standard.
Source: Moore, J.F. (1993), “Predators and Prey: A New Ecology of Competition,” Harvard Business Review, 71(3), 75–86; Jacobides, M.G., Cennamo, C. & Gawer, A. (2018), “Towards a Theory of Ecosystems,” Strategic Management Journal, 39(8), 2255–2276.