Is your business a jellyfish or a sea anemone?

The world of business is like an ecosystem.

Businesses need resources (money, water, fuel, electricity etc) in much the same way plants and animals need air, food and water.

This analogy therefore allows us to compare one with the other. For example a chemist is dependent on the customers who walk past her door in much the same way a sea anemone is dependent on the food which drifts past on the ocean currents. And an ice cream van is like a jelly fish because while it is still dependent on passers by, it can move.

We can therefore chose an animal or plant, more or less at random, and find a business which opperates in the same way.

How about a flight of swallows? They migrate over large distances, feed on the wing and go around in groups. The business model that would most closely fit this natural model would be perhaps musicians, some of whom will move from country to play Bach or Maler, and will meet up with colleagues when they arrive.  Possibly business speakers and singers are the same.

This analogy process also allows us to look at things which happen to the natural analogue, and see if they allow us to find how evolution might suggest improvements to the business model.

For example plants and animals do need to distribute information in the form of DNA to breed or spread their species. In the same way businesses need to distribute information through marketing to find new customers.

Some plants for example use bees to distribute their pollen in the same way that businesses use google to distribute their adverts. In the natural world some animals are better at this than others, squirrels eat the majority of the nuts the collect, and only a minority grow into trees. Bees are more efficient as they are communal and only eat a small amount of the pollen. In nature plants and animals evolve to favour the most successful strategy, so bees may be dropped in favour of flies if the flies are more efficient at pollination. In the same way the online agents which try to find us new customers (ie Google) may be dropped if better or more efficient ones appear.