The word ecosystem conjures up a rain forest in Ecuador, where sunlight, soil, water, and a multitude of species exist together in a self-sustaining environment that is constantly evolving.

This image from biology translates perfectly into what many people like to call an innovation ecosystem.

Think of a group of people developing a new idea, all doing what they are good at. There are the founding teams, the technologists and business leaders with a big vision; the people with capital, such as grant providers and venture investment community; the potential customers, partners, and acquirers; the service providers who help along the way, like lawyers and recruiters. All of that together, and more, forms an innovation ecosystem, and it can serve any industry or sector where technology can be deployed.

As with a natural ecosystem, things appear organic, but the underlying rules are based in physics. You could think of it as a jazz quartet where there’s creativity within uniformity. There’s improvisation, there’s cohesion, it’s a bit non-linear, but there are underlying rules and principles or boundaries in which all the musicians must operate.

Israel, one of the world’s foremost innovation ecosystems, understands this. The Israeli Innovation Authority is launching a program to enable foreign entrepreneurs to learn from its experience. It set up the Innovation Visas program last December to bring entrepreneurs in for two years, and  to guide applicants through the local high-tech ecosystem.

This framework will give international innovators some of the basic help they need to start out, such as work spaces, technological infrastructure, and business and logistical support. If they decide to establish a start-up there, they could receive government incentives offered to entrepreneurs who want to develop and validate technologies.

Another global technology hub has been actively playing this role for several years. The Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation is a buzzing ecosystem that hosts hundreds of companies and thousands of professionals working in areas such as green technology and biotech. It runs the , a platform to encourage foreign universities and research institutes and their spin-off companies to commercialize their R&D innovations by promoting their ideas to Hong Kong industry.

The °Ä˛ĘÍř is also embarking on development of an international innovation ecosystem through the groundbreaking new collaboration with the , a partnership with China’s Tsinghua University and foundation support from Microsoft. And, in June, a separate grassroots effort with the Dutch government commenced when Prince Constantijn van Oranje of the Netherlands led a delegation to Seattle as a special envoy for StartupDelta to help Dutch tech startups connect with businesses in the Pacific Northwest.

The Dutch are well positioned to be among the top innovation systems in the world, as they understand capital and have good universities, good programmers, and good designs. They already have experience in the innovation cycle. Case in point: The great companies of Phillips and Infineon are Dutch born and maintain their headquarters in the country. To reach the next level, they need help with scaling up. It will also require a culture shift, as they learn to accept that it’s okay to fail, and it’s okay to move quickly on an idea even though it’s not fully formed and tested out.

Connection is a crucial concept for an innovation ecosystem to work. But the connection here is much more meaningful and direct and human than a social network. It’s also based on trust so it takes time, whether you’re forming a team, negotiating with a customer, or financing a new product.

Most important for an innovation ecosystem is what I call the energy exchange. When you connect and resonate and energize with another person, there’s a creative spark and you come up with something together. There is no better way of creating teams than physical proximity. It doesn’t yet happen on Skype or a teleconference—part of the reason we’re bringing students from around the world together at the GIX in Bellevue, WA, to pursue innovation education together, in person. Once a connection has been created, once you have trust, then you can do things long distance. That’s different from the old way, where you start with a phone call or an e-mail and then go to a meeting in person.

Thomas Friedman talks about how the world is flat because we live in a network connected world. In a way, he’s right. Anyone can hire a programmer, develop a product, and trade with anyone in the world. But successful innovation depends on the quality of the connections. Most innovative products at their creation are made by teams of three to six people, and that interaction cannot be done remotely.

The Dutch entrepreneurs will spend ample time together with Seattle start-ups. This kind of relationship is the goal of the programs in Israel and Hong Kong, and will be more commonplace across the world. It’s necessary for all ecosystems connecting to each other to travel and spend time together.

So what happens if a Dutch scientist, a Seattle engineer, and a Hong Kong financier come together as the optimal team for an innovative product? How do they create the next large company without at least two of them having to move?

I think that’s the next open problem, the biggest challenge. To evolve, ecosystems need disruption, attention and nourishment and I’m sure new technologies, new business models and students and entrepreneurs that think globally and cross-culturally will help find a way.

Vikram Jandhyala is vice president for innovation strategy at the °Ä˛ĘÍř. He is executive director of , UW’s collaborative innovation hub, and the UW co-CEO of the Global Innovation Exchange (GIX).

Celebrate the launch of the Global Innovation Exchange. The Innovation Summit will be an amazing day of discussions, food and networking with leaders from academia, industry and community organizations. Panelists and keynote speaker Dr. Harry Shum, head of Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence and Research Group, will discuss how the UW and Seattle are innovating in health, computing and sustainability, transforming our region into a global competitor focused on both economic and societal impact.

LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman spoke this past May at the Tech Alliance luncheon in Seattle, and something he said got me thinking about Silicon Valley – and all innovation hubs — in a different way.

While interviewed on stage by angel investor Sarah Imbach, he called Silicon Valley “myopic” and urged people to pay attention to what’s going on in Seattle, the other tech hub where he now spends time as a startup investor and Microsoft board member.

Myopic is exactly right. And with that Silicon Valley and other innovation hubs risk losing their edge.

The innovation ecosystem in the Bay Area comes together like a non-linear neural network. There’s the perception that it is all self-organizing and efficient. They have ideas, networks, partners, teams, capital, and customers — it’s all there, and innovation can quickly scale.

But, at times, a myopic view can result in a follow-the-leader mentality. A case in point: In some instances venture capitalists give the appearance of a herd mentality by investing in trends they all see, at the same time.

In a place like Silicon Valley, resources do come together quickly. And what’s dangerous is pushing the same idea forward by a multitude of investors and entrepreneurs.

Oftentimes, everyone wants to jump in for fear of being left out. This is human nature. This attitude can result in VCs and entrepreneurs not taking risks and instead pursuing what the VC or entrepreneur next door is doing. The VC’s goal is to aggressively participate in the financing feeding frenzy at the right time so they can get a return. The entrepreneur might look for a fast and easy exit. This is where bubbles come from.

But a return or an exit is not innovation.

The problem is this: You cannot innovate with a consensus mindset.

Of course, there are still new and original ideas that completely transform a market. Examples include ride sharing and Netflix, but these are rare.

Mostly what we are seeing is that networks too often come together to do incremental things. They are not creating the next transistor chip or laser or next energy source. Certainly not with the frequency you would expect or we desire.

Innovation is more than just cool new apps.

An incremental mindset does not create breakthrough ideas. It creates, simply, temporary market penetration.

The Silicon Valley ecosystem itself – and Seattle too — can at times act like a big risk-averse company with a big balance sheet it’s trying to protect.

It’s Clayton M. Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma, applied to the whole network instead of a company.

Here’s the Innovator’s Dilemma: Once a company has successfully developed and launched an innovative product, it wants to produce it in a more efficient and profitable way rather than invest money in new, innovative, disruptive ideas. The dilemma is between investing in something new that could cannibalize the business now and letting upstart rivals run with the lower-end disruptive innovation that could blindside you later.

Some companies are working to break free of this dynamic that chooses scale over innovation.

Google is leveraging its success via Alphabet. Internet search is becoming progressively less profitable, so they are focused on innovative new areas like life sciences, robotics, and home automation.

Amazon is succeeding around retail and looking at it from different angles; case in point: its recent purchase of Whole Foods. Amazon is leveraging its expertise around operational efficiency to innovate in very different ways from the moonshot approach.

It’s time to change the myopic approach to innovation ecosystems. If we don’t make adjustments now, we’ll be talking about how the Innovators Dilemma is no longer an issue just for companies. It wil instead be an issue impacting innovation regions and entrepreneurial hubs like Silicon Valley and Seattle.

The time is now to disrupt the actual innovation process.

(The views expressed here are the personal opinions of the author and not those of the °Ä˛ĘÍř.)

 is vice president for innovation strategy at the °Ä˛ĘÍř, executive director of CoMotion, and co-executive director of the Global Innovation Exchange (GIX). He is a professor and former chair in the Department of Electrical Engineering and serves on the advisory boards of The Technology Alliance, Washington State China Relations Council, UW Foster Business School’s Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship, and Partners for Our Children. He founded, along with his students, Nimbic (acquired by Mentor Graphics) and was an early employee at Ansoft (acquired by Ansys).

Seattle and the UW aim to transform the U District into an innovation zone. Think of it as an urban Silicon Valley.

Vikram Jandhyala sees Seattle’s University District evolving into an “innovation district” — a place where public and private sectors work together to develop socially beneficial technologies. Think Silicon Valley, where Stanford University faculty and students launch new companies or work on their new technologies with existing tech giants. Read more .

Western Washington is already home to some of the most innovative people, companies, and academic programs in the world. And yet we should be doing much more to connect and support our local innovators, to attract more agents of change to the region, and to help them develop big new things.

Vikram Jandhyala, UW VP of Innovation Strategy and Executive Director of CoMotion

The topic of “fakenews” is of course in the news (real or fake!).  Associate Professor in the Anthropology Department, Sareeta Amrute, is interested in understanding the fake news problem from a sociological viewpoint. It appears that the top technology companies are, in their own image, looking for primarily technology solutions to a social and societal challenge.

We teamed up to write this article as an example of a challenge that can be best addressed by inclusive innovation which crosses multiple disciplines, organizations, and boundaries. One important question is the incentives for change in a market system and whether a fear of regulation is sufficient. Read the article published recently in BigThink .