- Author
- Hazel Weakly
- Published
- Undated (the post says it was a quarter done as of October 2025)
- Kind
- Personal blog post of unfinished research notes
- Original
- hazelweakly.me/blog/scaling-innovation-building-ecosystems/
- Subject
- Society and technology
What it is
Hazel Weakly, a practitioner, writes research notes on how organizations innovate. The post tries to unify several fields under complex adaptive systems.
What it says
- Weakly hypothesizes that any advanced system is an ecosystem, a culture and an adaptive system.
- The post argues large enterprises contain commons, such as the network, infrastructure, budget and platforms.
- The post treats Ostrom's design principles as near laws; breaking many gives short-lived systems.
- The author warns that meeting half the principles lets a system limp on, causing pain.
- Following Wardley, an ecosystem is a future sensing engine; commoditising parts lets others innovate.
- The post describes a trust-building loop between platform teams and product teams.
- Citing Hicks and Hevesi, developer problem-solving is a cumulative culture of social learning.
What evidence it gives
The post compiles citations, including Ostrom, McGinnis, Cox and colleagues, Wardley and Hicks and Hevesi. It marks the author's own hypotheses. The cumulative culture section is raw notes. The operads and resilience engineering sections are not written.
Interests and limits
The author says the author is not an expert in most of these fields. The post is a quarter done. The author holds anecdotal and qualitative evidence in high regard. Hicks, whose paper is cited, is described as a good friend of the author. No experiments or data are offered. The unifying claim is a personal hypothesis.