The Minimum Viable Ecosystem
Does it still work when you walk away?
An MVP answers whether one thing works. An MVE answers whether the pieces hold together without us. Financed electric vehicles are a product. The vehicle plus financing plus training plus maintenance plus a resale market is the ecosystem. The ecosystem is what survives month nine, or does not.
What the practice requires
- Name every role the solution depends on, including the ones nobody is paying for yet.
- Score Adner's two risks before building. Co-innovation risk: what else must succeed. Adoption-chain risk: who else must say yes before the beneficiary benefits.
- Scope the deployment as the smallest version that instruments all named roles at once.
- Then leave, and measure. Survival ninety days after withdrawal is the real result.
- Publish findings either way.
Why a product is not enough
- Moore's whole product and Adner's wide lens land on the same point. The customer buys the complete solution.
- The complete solution is assembled from other people's willingness to act.
- The parts that kill ecosystem ventures are rarely the parts the founding team was excited about.
Where it goes wrong
- Building the elegant node and assuming the network exists.
- Automating one step of a chain whose other steps still need what the automation removed.
- Calling an integration successful while the team is still in the room holding it together.
Measures
- Roles named and instrumented, against roles the solution depends on.
- Co-innovation and adoption-chain risks scored before build, with the register attached.
- Deployment survival at team-withdrawal plus 90 days.
- Dependencies that failed versus dependencies anticipated in the register.
- Days from program end to published findings, pass or fail.
Three cases
These cases come from the public record: settlements, filings, testimony and the companies' own reporting. Citations are being attached case by case. Good, bad and ugly describe one decision against this one question, not the company as a whole.
Off-grid solar as a stack
The businesses that displaced kerosene shipped the lamp with distribution, consumer financing and after-sales service. The lamp alone had been available for years.
Shyp and the last-mile economics
A courier would come to your door, pack the thing and ship it. Venture-backed, beautifully executed, and shut down once the cost of the pickup refused to fit the price customers would pay. The app was the easy part.
Zume's pizza robots
A $2.25 billion valuation, multiple pivots, and a shutdown after years of trying. Automation inserted into a chain whose other steps had not been solved as a system.
How this one is marked
Green means we have the evidence and it carries a date. Yellow means someone owns the gap and there is a date to close it. Red stops the work until it clears. Early work sits at yellow for a long while, and we mark it that way.