Adam Zeiner

An ecosystem map provides business stakeholders with a holistic overview of the different stakeholders and their internal relationships that together make up the ecosystem in which they aim to operate.

The impact of these influences remains today. It shows up in the language of business, for example – think of all the business jargon that clearly has military roots. [...] Even my own business school was organized into cohorts—a structure modeled after the Roman legions.

We also need to stop treating them as monolithic models of the entire system. We’re in the digital age now and maps are cheap. There’s no reason we can’t have multiple versions or break our research up into multiple maps, each with a well defined scope and focus.

At Design Council, we work across the design economy, and — even though we have specialisms in architecture & the built environment, social innovation & business innovation — we have Experts whose design work goes well beyond that and our research and frameworks should be something all designers can use.