Startup Ecosystem

Startup Ecosystem—the Big Picture Outcomes Not Outputs

Posted January 29, 2025

In Benefit Venture Blog, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Stakeholder Capitalism, Strategy

Startup Ecosystem—the Big Picture: Christopher Marquis, a professor at the Judge School of Management at iamge of community to illustrate a startup ecosystem Cambridge University and author of The Profiteers: How Business Privatizes Profits and Socializes Costs, says, “We must rethink and transform the entire system, leaving behind shareholder primacy to create a new regenerative paradigm.”

Welcoming the Unwelcome: Wholehearted Living in a Brokenhearted World is a book in which Pema Chödrön says,“We can’t have an enlightened society or a sane and peaceful world if the individuals within it are stuck in small fixed mind”. She is an American-born Buddhist nun. These two people are from entirely different spheres of society, but both consider the big picture in which to consider issues that should concern all of us and entrepreneurs in particular.

Clearly entrepreneurs need to consider the big picture of their own startup ecosystem, at the same time as they focus about the small picture of the wonderful startup products and services they create. It’s not simply a matter of the immediate local system of support, services, money, competition—it’s the wider world that includes the social norms and rules embedded in the economic and legislative structures. The startup ecosystem deeply impacted by attitudes and behaviors in the environment and among people. Ecosystem awareness will, in the first place, enable the new venture’s start and, over time, to prosper.

Startup Ecosystem—a Big Picture Example

image of one pair of hands passing a globe to another pair of hands

The Big Picture

Many people have great ideas and think of starting a business, some actually do, but many fail. One reason for not starting—or not surviving—is a failure to appreciate the business context of the market for the new venture’s products.

Context in entrepreneurship literature is the critical role of recognizing the big picture of the startup ecosystem: the whole economic, social, governance and physical environment. It’s not simply a matter of the product and the market.

Think about healthcare in the USA as an example, where the sector’s business model is very complex, and has serious flaws both at the macro and micro levels, notwithstanding all the brilliant and dedicated people in medicine, hospitals, services, pharma, government and many other spheres of activity in society that relate to the healthcare market. Given that disease and disability concern every citizen, healthcare is a very big, Big Picture.

The first example is the cost of US healthcare per capita and healthcare outcomes by comparison with other countries. There is an abundance of data, both within the US and internationally about different healthcare systems. For table comparing healthcare cost per capital in USA and Canada vs life expectancy and maternal mortality (USA cost is double and survival rates much lower) example, sixty nine per cent of the world population has universal health coverage, but the US is one of the 31 per cent of countries that does not. In 2024, it is the only developed country without universal health coverage.

Just looking at the US and our neighbor, Canada, the table shows two strikingly different contexts. The US per capita healthcare costs about twice those in Canada. The whole system of healthcare provision is obviously very different. By comparison, two healthcare outcomes, for example, life expectancy and maternal mortality rates, are very different.

The second example from the healthcare sector concerns medical insurance costs by different providers. It’s at the other end of the scale from national healthcare provision as a whole. This micro-example concerns myself. The annual annual cost under my Medicare prescription drug plan for the two pills I take daily was nearly $1,500 last year. This year however, the cost of same pills, covered by my new insurer will amount to only about $35. Both providers are in the same business field, but the difference in cost of about 24 times is difficult to explain, without taking a holistic view of the marketplace.

Both these two examples demonstrate unseen hazards of starting a new venture in ignorance of the big picture. Even though a startup can not, for instance change the Federal healthcare structure on its own a new entrant can either make its own small mark or avoid pitfalls.

Appreciation of the Startup Ecosystem—the Big Picture

There is much data that links that a purposeful understanding and response to the changing world with improved business performance. As Professor Rebecca Henderson of Harvard Business School has said, “Our historical focus on ‘me’ and ‘right now’ seems increasingly problematic in light of the large-scale challenges facing society”, such as inequality of opportunity, divisive wealth distribution, or negative environmental consequences.

Purpose-driven policies and behaviors that an entrepreneur implements in the light of understanding the big picture, will likely have positive both altruistic and commercial effects upon:

Operational productivity¹
Brand loyalty²
Supplier performance³
Revenue growth⁴
Innovation effectiveness⁵
Legal well-being⁶
Personal satisfaction⁷
Staff recruitment⁸
Employee commitment⁹
Environmental safety¹⁰
Community support¹¹

Focus on Outcomes Rather Than Outputs

image to illustrate outcomes (sapling tree) vs. output (coins) The overall benefit from awareness and action on the big picture is that the startup is more likely to achieve purposeful strategies when they are defined from the outset as being concerned with outcomes rather than outputs. Outcomes are are themselves more likely to fit the big picture purpose, than the narrower focus on money and numbers. A bonus for the startup is that purpose is much easier to consider and define at the outset of a business, rather than in an established business with established norms and priorities.

Outputs are financial results, production or sales volumes. Outcomes are what happens in consequence, like improved user experience or loyalty, less environmental damage and cost, better employee recruitment and retention, less salary imbalance, reduced waste, fewer legal entanglements. Hence outcomes may be trickier to evaluate or measure, since though some are quantifiable, many are impressionistic. What therefore it becomes important is not only track what happens under the direct control of the business, but awareness of the behavior of those impacted outside the business in the wider world, since startups change the world.

Startup Ecosystem—the Big Picture Outcomes Not Outputs

Startup Ecosystem—a Big Picture Example

Appreciation of the Startup Ecosystem—the Big Picture

Focus on Outcomes Rather Than Outputs

Further Reading on Venture Founders