Alignment for Sustaining Innovation Systems
Regularly Disruptive #8
There’s a common thread running through this week’s stories: progress doesn’t come from the tech or money alone—it comes from alignment. This issue is about what that alignment actually looks like when you’re building ecosystems in the real world.
PLUS - we recognize some great ecosystem and movement progress in Tennessee, St. Louis, and Indiana — AI for health, human-animal ecosystems, new university and industry collaborations, regenerative agriculture, space for working together, and more.
Tactic Worth Trying: Family Offices as Ecosystem Partners
If every ecosystem chases the same shrinking pool of federal dollars, what happens when the money doesn’t show up?
You might already be feeling it. As Amy Beaird of Ecosystem Edge lays out in this sharp LinkedIn post, federal funding that many ecosystem builders have relied on is becoming more uncertain, slower, and more competitive by the month. If that’s the case, where else should ecosystem leaders be looking next?
The Tactic
Some ecosystems are shifting their funding strategy away from uncertain grants and toward a different kind of partner: family offices.
Family offices are privately held companies that handles coordinated investment and wealth management for a wealthy family. These are privately managed pools of capital designed around legacy, values, and decades-long horizons—not quarterly returns. That makes them unusually well-matched to the realities of deep tech, health innovation, climate infrastructure, and place-based ecosystem building, where progress is slow, nonlinear, and very real.
Instead of treating family offices like awkward substitutes for VCs or one-off philanthropic checks, some ecosystem leaders are learning to invite them in as long-game collaborators.
In practice, this looks more like relationship design than a pitch deck roadshow. Ecosystem leaders start with the problem—regional bottlenecks, translational gaps, workforce misalignment—and then create concrete roles family offices can steward over time. In health and life sciences, that might mean co-funding translational programs alongside hospitals or accelerators. In climate or advanced manufacturing, it could mean anchoring venture studios, shared infrastructure, or redevelopment efforts tied to regional resilience. The capital comes with patience—and often with lived operating experience and local commitment that institutional investors don’t have.
The biggest possible alignment? Family offices don’t need your ecosystem to “exit.” They need it to endure.
Takeaways:
Design for decades, not demos. If your ecosystem’s biggest challenges won’t resolve in 18 months, your capital strategy shouldn’t pretend they will.
Invite capital into authorship, not sponsorship. Family offices are most powerful when they help shape the work—not just fund it.
Learn More:
Federal Funding in 2026 for Ecosystem Builders - Amy Beaird on LinkedIn
How Family Offices Are Cracking the Code on Biotech Investing – Life Science Nation
Why Do Venture Studios Attract Investors? – Mandalore Partners
Family Offices Have Become the New Power Players on Wall Street – Wall Street Journal
Shout-Outs: Regenerative, AI, Physical Space, and Cross Species Health in Missouri, Tennessee, and Indiana
Leaders of cross disciplinary ecosystems in Indiana, Tennessee, and Missouri are moving things forward. How can you and your stakeholders collaborate in win/wins with these?
39 North (St. Louis) is expanding shared office and event space with support from Missouri Technology Corporation’s Physical Infrastructure Grant Program, responding to growing demand from agtech founders who need flexible, collision-friendly places to build. Source: Missouri Technology Corporation on LinkedIn
Launch Tennessee continues to deepen university–industry collaboration through its HALO initiative, creating clearer pathways for research, founders, and corporates to move innovation from campus to market. Source: Launch Tennessee – University–Industry Innovation
ReACH Summit has announced 11 featured Regenerative Ag innovators for its February 2026 Summit, spotlighting the strength of the St. Louis ag and food innovation ecosystem for global ag innovators. Source: Chad Zimmerman on LinkedIn
Washington University in St. Louis is launching a new seed funding opportunity focused on AI for Health, signaling continued institutional commitment to early-stage translational innovation. Source: WashU announcement
Indiana’s One Health Innovation District is blending human and animal health innovation, reinforcing how cross-disciplinary approaches can anchor regional strengths and unlock new collaboration models. Source: One Health Innovation District announcement. Source: Mitch Frazier on LinkedIn
These show innovation leaders creating space, connections, development, and cross-disciplinary collaboration for the stakeholders they serve. What are you developing for your ecosystem or movement?
Signal – Are Robots Inevitably Our Work Partners?
If you’ve seen coverage from CES, you know that robots are everywhere. Are they coming for work — or into work alongside humans? The buzz might make it seem like machines are replacing people. But you’re building an ecosystem for humans not their tools. From this perspective a different story is emerging: one of coordination, human-machine orchestration, and opportunity in the gaps between automation and real work.
Recent examples — from Ford’s persistent mechanic shortage to Amazon’s million-plus warehouse robots, from UPS’s robotic logistics push to robotics founders citing “not enough manpower” — show something important: robots aren’t filling all the work. They’re filling parts of work where humans are increasingly expected to integrate with machines. The real bottleneck isn’t robot technology. It’s systems of people, robots and businesses ready and empowered to work together.
Robots are already part of how work gets done — look at how many have been used in auto manufacturing for decades, for example — but they’re not independent agents. They’re tools embedded in workflows that humans still design, supervise, and improve. The media often focuses on how many robots are deployed or how fast they replace human workers. That’s too restrictive a view. A deeper look shows recurring themes:
Skill scarcity at the human end. Ford’s $160,000 mechanic role remains open because the job isn’t just wrench-turning — it’s interpreting machine behavior, diagnosing complex systems, and integrating data with action. That’s advanced human skill interacting with machines.
Labor shortages are coordination problems. If Singapore’s robotics leaders say they lack manpower even as they build robots, the constraint isn’t automation — it’s aligning training, work design, and real human demand.
Robots scale tasks, humans scale systems. Amazon and UPS are deploying robots to handle physically repetitive tasks. But someone still has to orchestrate the overall flow, troubleshoot exceptions, and evolve the system over time — and those roles are inherently human.
Every deployment surfaces human questions. Who gets trained? Who benefits? Who adapts and who is left behind? These aren’t side issues — they are core ecosystem design problems.
Taken together, these trends point to a different frame than “robots versus humans.” The signal is that machines amplify human capability when humans are central to how systems evolve.
Takeaways:
Treat labor shortages as signals about system fit. If employers can’t find people, the question isn’t just training — it’s whether your ecosystem aligns pathways, credentials, and workplace expectations to real jobs. How can you help with innovation collaboration?
Build human—machine orchestration capacity. Shared labs, cross-sector partnerships, and integrated training programs that focus on human roles in automated systems are foundational ecosystem infrastructure.
Design ecosystems for people with machines, not machines instead of people. Robots can handle tasks; humans handle context, judgment, and adaptation. Support collaboration where those roles intersect, whether that’s with your known stakeholders or ones you’ve not yet worked with.
Learn More (Sources & Inspiration)
These stories helped surface the pattern:
The $160,000 Mechanic Job That Ford Can’t Fill — shows how advanced roles tied to automation still depend on human expertise.
The opportunity isn’t one robot. It’s orchestration: people and machines sharing space, power, and plans — talks about how robotics and automation have promise in architecture, engineering, and construction, but there are system-wide challenges that need addressing first.
We ‘don’t have enough manpower’ for the delivery boom, says Singapore-based robotics founder — highlights real human demand gaps at the intersection of automation and work.
‘Robots are going to be amongst us’: Qualcomm exec says buckle up for the next 5 years. Your car is going to be the first shoe to drop — signals how robotics are seeping into everyday infrastructure.
UPS Purchases 400 Robots to Unload Trucks in Automation Push — robots scaling physical work, with humans overseeing systems.
Amazon has more than 1 million robots that sort, lift, and carry packages — see them in action — machines at work, humans in charge of exceptions and evolution.
For further context on how ecosystem leaders can center human value in tech-enabled ecosystems, see our recent Signal on human-centric AI ecosystems.
Call to Action: Treat Ecosystem Sustainability Like Product-Market Fit
Every startup and scaleup is expected to continuously zero in on product-market fit. Who is this for? What problem does it solve? Why would someone pay? Why would they come back?
Ecosystems deserve the same discipline. A financially self-sustaining ecosystem isn’t one that replaces grants with fees or turns every activity into a revenue stream. It’s one that understands where real demand exists, where patience is required, and where one-off investments can responsibly test what might come next.
That starts by letting earned revenue play its proper role—not as a moral stance, but as a signal. When someone is willing to pay, renew, or deepen their engagement, it tells you something is working. When they aren’t, it tells you something just as useful. Both are feedback. Ignoring either delays learning.
Long-term investment and philanthropy matter just as much—but differently. Their role isn’t to permanently underwrite uncertainty. It’s to support work whose value is real but slow to mature: shared infrastructure, translational pathways, workforce alignment, and trust-based collaboration. This is the capital that gives ecosystems time to become useful at scale.
There are also one-off investments and donations. Used well, they function like experiments—testing new services, new partners, or new value propositions. Used poorly, they quietly prop up activity no one would choose again.
The concept here is simple, if not always comfortable:
Hold your ecosystem to the same standard you ask of founders.
Name who you serve.
Unbundle what you offer.
Test willingness to pay.
Pay attention to and iteratively serve better who comes back.
For a deeper look at what “ecosystem product-market fit” actually entails, see this checklist on LinkedIn.
Ecosystems don’t stall from lack of effort, vision, or purpose. They stall when activity doesn’t create value. The leaders building systems that endure are the ones designing financial models that reflect how value actually shows up in the world—not how we wish it would.
📩 Contact dan@openlydisruptive.com to talk about improving the Product Market Fit of your ecosystem or movement.
Thanks for reading. Regularly Disruptive is written by Dan Reus, Founder & Chief Instigator of Openly Disruptive, a boutique consultancy dedicated to helping innovation leaders deliver transformational impact. If you found value here, forward this issue to a colleague in your innovation network and let’s expand the circle.