Greater Boston׳s industrial ecosystem: A manufactory of sectors

•Examines evolutionary processes of regional innovation opportunity creation.•Industrial ecosystem concept combines institutional design with self-organizing processes.•Applies evolutionary metaphors to business models, sector emergence and transition.•Presents sector growth results of high-tech company database.

This paper examines the sources of the emergence in greater Boston of a large population of technology differentiating enterprises and the systemic processes by which new opportunities for innovation are both created and enacted in the form of emerging, co-adapting, and growing high tech sectors. I argue that Greater Boston׳s population of small- and medium-sized high-tech enterprises offers a systemic form of opportunity creation and enacting processes for industrial innovation. But they do not do so alone. The population of enterprises is embedded in a regional industrial ecosystem that facilitates ongoing reshuffling of the region׳s expertise, technology capabilities and financial resources for not only a single company but for a cluster of companies to grow fast. The concept of a regional industrial ecosystem suggests a locality analogous to Darwin׳s ‘small area׳ in which a ‘manufactory of species׳ is active but applied to the emergence, coadaptation, and growth of diverse sectors.