‘Beyond Butterflies’ – An Ecotonal Lens on Innovation

Earlier this year, I got together with fellow Future Value advisor and biomimicry expert extraordinaire Michaela Emch. What started as an open online discussions turned into a series of articles on innovation - which we will share over the course of November.

Metaphors and the Dominant Innovation Narrative
Metaphors guide the way we think and behave. They shape our understanding of how the world works, influencing what we pay attention to and our decision-making heuristics. Metaphors also guide our collective norms and expectations, impacting the design of spaces, budgets, and regulations.
In the field of innovation, the dominant metaphor revolves around metamorphosis: the caterpillar becomes a butterfly, the tadpole becomes a frog, the start-up becomes a unicorn. This metaphor suggests a one-time, irreversible change from a grubby childhood to fully-formed adulthood.
According to this model, all of this happens within a protected cocoon. This is why we design incubators as spaces where larval startups can find the right conditions to mature. The metaphor shapes our broader expectations around "innovation ecosystems," including funding allocations, policy settings, and general norms.

Challenging the Metamorphosis Metaphor: Ecotones as an Alternative
But what if this isn't the best way to think about innovation? After all, isn’t innovation a messy process of diffusion, based on iterative back-and-forth? What if we shifted our default thinking from the one-time transformation of a defined entity to more diffused evolutions that circulate organically?
Instead of metamorphosis, we propose adopting ecotones as our leading metaphor. Ecotones are zones of overlap, where multiple ecosystems come into contact. They can be marshlands, mangroves, or forest edges; they can be mucous membranes or outer suburbia. Ecotones are spaces of ambivalent belonging and unexpected encounters—much like how we describe innovation ecosystems.

Your turn:

• Where else do you see the metamorphosis metaphor shaping your thinking?
• What are the ecotones in your life that you are aware of?