Ecosystems and niches

24 June 2026

My technical background is in biotechnology (read: molecular biology with a sprinkling of entrepreneurial thinking) but one of my great loves was always ecology and evolutionary theory. This is despite the fact that I'm not a particularly great statistician (I leave that to my highly skilled brother), nor am I someone who has spent time living and working in the wild (that is my talented and adventursome sister). Instead, what I like about these disciplines is the system-level thinking that they encourage - zooming out through time and space to uncover general principles that shape life on earth, and zooming in to specific habitats to discover how different organisms interact and form living communities.

This is all very well, of course, but counts as perhaps an interesting side project or hobby rather than anything of use to the entrepreneur or business person. However, some of the principles are analogous and useful, and the one I want to focus on today is the concept of a niche. An ecological niche is the role that an organism plays in a given ecosystem - the sum of how it lives, feeds and interacts with its environment. Broad niches reoccur over and over, often at different scales or in different habitats, so that most habitats will have their small, fast-breeding herbivors, their ambush predators, generalist omnivors, scavengers and apex predators. But the really interesting thing is that niches tend to be exclusive - if two organisms find themselves occupying the same niche, then invariably they will compete until one is driven out or rendered extinct. 

Businesses likewise operate in niches, although here the churn and development of businesses mean that there are frequently multiple businesses competing in the same niches, as well as businesses in the process of evolving to occupy different niches. Here an understanding of the niche one occupies, its dynamics and its competitors, is key to short-term survival, and any business that survives for any length of time will invariably have this information encoded into itself on a pretty deep level. The danger comes in times of transition - of new businesses entering a niche, or of businesses changing to try successfully evolve into a new one. Pity the lion who tries to swim in the ocean, for there are apex predators there that it will struggle to compete with. 

As always, knowledge and metis, as well as a heavy dose of flexibility, are needed when trying to anticipate the new.