The Insurgency Math
From map to action: why the distance between diagnosis and intervention in entrepreneurial ecosystems is longer than it looks.
In an earlier post in this series, we argued that the standard response to an underperforming entrepreneurial ecosystem: adding capital, programs, and organizations, usually misses the actual problem. The gap is rarely a missing actor. It is more often a missing connection between actors who are already there. If that argument is new to you, this previous post is the place to start.
That argument raises an obvious next question. How does a map become a decision?
That transition is harder than it sounds, and not for the reasons you might expect.
The question that gets skipped
The conventional ecosystem development process moves quickly from assessment to action. Gaps are identified, programs are designed, capital is deployed, and outputs are counted. The intervention logic connecting those steps is rarely examined in any detail, because the direction seems obvious: if something is missing, supply it.
What a structural read of the ecosystem often reveals is that the intervention logic is where most of the value gets lost. The problem is not the absence of a resource. It is the absence of a relationship between resources that are already present. Closing that gap requires knowing not just which connections are missing, but which bridge, once built, would propagate most widely through the network. That is a prioritization problem, and it turns out to have a rigorous answer.
Where the math comes from
More than a decade ago, our team, then researchers at West Point, was working on a different problem entirely: how to most efficiently degrade an insurgency network. The question was which node or connection, if removed, would produce the greatest cascading disruption across the system as a whole. It required mapping the network, identifying which links were load-bearing, and ranking potential interventions by their downstream effect.
The math that answered that question travels. We have spent considerable time working out what happens when you invert it. The most damaging cut in an adversarial network is, structurally, the same as the most valuable bridge in a beneficial one. The connection whose removal would most efficiently collapse a network is the same kind of connection whose addition would most efficiently strengthen one. The logic is identical. The direction is reversed.
Applied to an entrepreneurial ecosystem, this means the prioritization question has a structure to it that is not arbitrary. The bridge most worth building is not the one that addresses the most visible gap. It is the one between role types that are already well-embedded in the network, so that the benefits of bridging them propagate through the connections that already exist. A new link between two peripheral actors goes nowhere. A new link between two central ones compounds.
That is a different answer than most ecosystem assessments produce, and it comes from a genuinely different place.
The Southern Africa sharpening
Our early engagement work in Southern Africa has been instructive here, less for what it is revealing about specific ecosystems and more for what it is revealing about the challenge of getting the question accepted in the first place.
The practitioners and funders we have been working with are sophisticated and serious. They are not resistant to structural thinking. But they are oriented, reasonably, toward the questions their current tools are built to answer: how many organizations exist, how much capital has been deployed, how many founders have been trained. When the frame shifts toward connections, toward asking which of those actors are actually linked to each other and where the critical relationships are absent, the question lands as genuinely unfamiliar. Not unwelcome, just new.
That reception is itself a finding. It suggests that the gap between map and action is not primarily a technical problem. It is a conceptual one. The intervention logic that follows from a structural picture is different enough from the standard playbook that it requires a different kind of conversation before it can produce different kinds of decisions.
What closing the gap actually looks like
The work we are building toward has a specific end state. It is not a better report or a more sophisticated dashboard. It is a structural picture of an ecosystem that is clear enough, and grounded enough in observed relationships rather than assumed ones, that the intervention question becomes hard to avoid.
Not prescriptively. The people with contextual knowledge and accountability still make the decisions. But when the picture shows that two role types are both well-embedded in the ecosystem and almost entirely disconnected from each other, the case for bridging them does not require a lengthy argument. It is visible. The conversation shifts from “what should we fund?” to “who is positioned to build this bridge, and what would it take?”
That shift is the point. In the next post in this thread, we will get into what making that picture legible actually requires, and why comparing an ecosystem against a reference turns out to be the step that changes the conversation most.
If you are working on ecosystem development in frontier markets, in government, or in institutional contexts where these questions are live, we would like to hear from you at info@stormkinganalytics.com.