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Ecosystemic Irreversibility:
Toward a Theory of Executional Substrate in Corporate Strategy

Author
Dr. Young D. Lee
Principal, NYET – New York Institute of Entrepreneurship and Technology®
Contact: Dr.Lee@ket-nyet.org

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Introduction

In recent years, strategy scholars, institutional theorists, and innovation economists have observed the emergence of a novel organizational phenomenon that resists explanation within existing conceptual frames. A small but growing subset of firms—most visibly those whose valuations exceed one trillion dollars—appear to have transcended conventional models of competitive advantage. These firms no longer merely outperform rivals in the marketplace; they reconstitute the executional architectures through which other organizations, public and private alike, must now operate. Their innovation ecosystems no longer compete for adoption—they serve as operational conditions. Their architectures are not components of infrastructure—they are infrastructure itself.

This paper introduces the construct of ecosystemic irreversibility to explain this emergent organizational form. By this term, I refer to a condition in which a firm’s innovation ecosystem becomes an executional substrate—a structurally embedded layer of operational logic that is irreducible, institutionally absorbed, and non-substitutable. In such a condition, the firm no longer functions as one actor among many; it becomes the infrastructural medium through which institutional coordination is silently composed.

The emergence of ecosystemal irreversibility signals a paradigmatic shift in the basis of strategic relevance. Traditional evaluative criteria—such as asset efficiency, technological leadership, or market share—become insufficient in describing the role these firms now play. Their strategic salience derives not from what they control, but from what others can no longer do without them. These are not simply powerful firms. They are architects of procedural necessity—organizations whose design logics define the grammar of action across domains they do not formally govern.

This phenomenon calls for a new theoretical vocabulary. Existing literatures on resource-based advantage, platform dynamics, and institutional logics provide partial insights, but none adequately theorize the transition from an innovation ecosystem as a collaborative domain to an infrastructural precondition.

To address this conceptual lacuna, I develop a mid-range theory of ecosystemal irreversibility—a theory of how firms cease to compete within environments and instead come to constitute them.

Central to this theory is the distinction between executional substrate and ecosystemic irreversibility. Executional substrate refers to the condition in which a firm’s innovation architecture becomes structurally absorbed into the operational workflows of other institutions—a formal embedding of its design logic. Ecosystemal irreversibility, by contrast, describes the point at which this substrate becomes non-substitutable, non-reconstructible, and institutionally definitive.

In this view, corporate strategy becomes not merely the pursuit of differentiation, but the design of executional inevitability—the irreversible infrastructural conditions through which others must now organize, adapt, and endure.

Theoretical Problem

Despite growing empirical evidence that some firms now function as infrastructural layers within broader institutional systems, existing theoretical frameworks remain ill-equipped to explain this transformation. Strategic management has historically conceptualized the firm as an entity pursuing advantage within bounded markets. While this view has evolved—from resource-based approaches (Barney, 1991) to dynamic capabilities (Teece, Pisano, & Shuen, 1997) and platform-based ecosystems (Gawer & Cusumano, 2014)—its analytic focus remains largely internalist, transactional, or market-centric.

Platform theory, for instance, has advanced our understanding of multi-sided markets and network effects, highlighting how firms orchestrate value through third-party complementors. However, these accounts assume voluntary participation and reversible engagement. They do not theorize the irreversible externalization of executional dependency, nor do they account for the condition in which institutional actors—such as ministries, universities, and regulators—become structurally entangled with, and dependent upon, a firm’s logic of design and cadence of operation.

Similarly, resource-based views and their derivatives locate advantage within firm-specific assets and capabilities. While these theories have explained how firms sustain competitive advantage through difficult-to-imitate resources, they fall short in addressing two critical transitions:
(1) how a firm’s architecture evolves from a differentiating asset into an operational grammar for others, and
(2) under what institutional and structural conditions this grammar becomes externally adopted as a societal substrate—one that other actors must integrate to remain procedurally intelligible. Competitive advantage, in these models, is bounded within firm-centric utility—not extended into public necessity.

Even institutional logics theory (Thornton, Ocasio, & Lounsbury, 2012), which has brought cognitive and cultural dimensions into view, offers little guidance on what occurs when corporate design logics quietly reconfigure the procedural norms of governance, education, and policy—not through law or legitimacy, but through default infrastructural dependence. The phenomenon at hand does not fit the model of institutional isomorphism, nor does it reflect contestation among logics. It represents a more subterranean dynamic: the migration of executional authority from public institutions to private architectures.

What is needed, then, is a theory capable of explaining when, how, and under what conditions a firm’s innovation ecosystem ceases to function as a competitive domain and instead becomes a procedural necessity—an executional substrate—for adjacent systems across sectors. This is not technological lock-in, nor is it market capture in the traditional sense. It is a deeper form of institutional substrate migration: a foundational shift in who designs the operational logic of societal coordination, and on what infrastructural terms that coordination becomes possible.

Conceptual Core: Ecosystemic Irreversibility

To theorize the organizational form that arises when firms cease to compete within institutional environments and begin to compose them, I introduce the construct of ecosystemal irreversibility.

Definition

Ecosystemic irreversibility refers to:

A condition in which a firm’s innovation ecosystem becomes an executional substrate—an externally embedded grammar of design that functions as an institutional protocol layer, through which other entities must structurally build, operate, and adapt to preserve viability, sustain relevance, and retain legitimacy.

In this context, the “grammar of design” refers not to aesthetic or stylistic coherence, but to the operational syntax—a rule-bound structure of procedures, standards, and update rhythms—that silently governs institutional behavior across domains the firm does not formally control. It is not merely influential; it becomes structurally preconditional.

In this condition, the firm’s architecture becomes institutionally indispensable. It functions not as a platform for value exchange, but as the procedural scaffolding of organizational execution across sectors that the firm does not formally govern. What emerges is not voluntary interdependence, but institutional entanglement—where the firm’s design logic becomes the tacit protocol shaping the bounds of institutional behavior. No longer optional, it becomes the invisible grammar through which action must occur.

Crucially, ecosystemal irreversibility does not emerge from scale alone, nor from market power in the traditional sense. It is the product of two mutually reinforcing evolutionary processes: (1) the deepening externalization of corporate design units, and (2) the migration of institutional orchestration authority toward firms capable of encoding systemic coordination.

1. The Evolution of Strategic Design Units

Over time, firms have shifted the locus of their strategic design activity from internal asset optimization toward external environmental shaping. This transition follows a six-stage evolution of design externalization:

Technology → Product → Platform → System → Architecture → Innovation Ecosystem

• Technology: Internal capabilities embedded within proprietary R&D
• Product: Encapsulated functions translated into offerings for end users
• Platform: Configurable interfaces enabling external actors to co-create value
• System: Integration of internal and external components into coordinated functionality
• Architecture: Formalized design logic—standards, protocols, and temporal cadences—that shape how systems interoperate
• Innovation Ecosystem: A co-evolving, structurally absorbed environment in which institutions align their operations with the firm’s executional logic

Notably, the distinction between platform and architecture is essential. Whereas platforms manage voluntary interaction through boundary control, architectures govern how interaction must occur—defining not just what is possible, but how possibilities are constructed.

At the terminus of this trajectory, the firm ceases to offer discrete value propositions. Instead, it defines the operational grammar others must adopt to remain procedurally legible. Strategy, at this stage, is no longer about differentiation—it becomes the design of institutional preconditions.

2. The Migration of Institutional Design Authority

Parallel to the evolution of design units is a second, less theorized but equally consequential trajectory: the shifting locus of institutional orchestration. Across modern history, the authority to define operational environments has moved between actors:

Region → Nation-State → Corporation → University

• Regions: Enabled innovation through spatial agglomeration
• Nation-states: Structured innovation through infrastructure, policy, and funding
• Corporations: Now shape executional logic across systems and sectors
• Universities: Increasingly function as trans-sectoral synthesizers and validators

While these entities coexist, their relative authority to orchestrate systemic coordination has shifted. In the current epoch, it is the corporation—particularly those whose innovation architectures have become executional substrates across multiple domains—that has emerged as the de facto orchestrator of institutional environments.

This transformation is most visible among firms whose market capitalizations exceed the $1T threshold, not by virtue of scale alone, but because their executional grammars have become institutionally internalized across education, regulation, procurement, and civic infrastructure. Their authority is not granted through legal delegation—it is authored through infrastructure.

This shift is neither normative nor formally codified. It unfolds beneath the surface of institutional awareness, through the silent migration of design authority—away from law and toward logic, away from declared mandates and toward embedded protocol.

Synthesis

The convergence of these two trajectories—the externalization of strategic design and the privatization of orchestration authority—produces the conditions under which ecosystemic irreversibility emerges.

At this point, the firm is no longer a node in a value network. It becomes the substrate of that network’s execution.
It no longer competes to be chosen. It conditions what remains choosable.

Mechanism: From Design to Substrate

Ecosystemic irreversibility does not emerge through formal policy delegation, legal monopoly, or explicit institutional adoption. Rather, it arises through a set of subtle, compounding mechanisms by which a firm’s innovation architecture migrates from a context of voluntary use to one of structural necessity. This transition—from external tool to embedded substrate—operates through four interrelated processes:

1. Protocolal Embedding

Design tools become default standards, and standards become invisible prerequisites.

Firms often begin by offering tools or interfaces that accelerate adoption and ease development (e.g., NVIDIA’s CUDA, Microsoft’s SDKs, Tesla’s OTA firmware stack). Over time, these tools mature into protocols—shared grammars of execution that govern how external actors develop, test, and deploy capabilities.

Over time, these protocols are no longer perceived as optional—they become unseen not by omission, but by saturation.
Absorbed into daily operations, they form infrastructural expectations: the silent substrates upon which curricula are designed, APIs are constructed, and institutional performance is assessed.

This embedding is not the result of formal adoption—it is the outcome of systemic habituation. As actors repeatedly align with the firm’s interfaces and design cadence, the executional environment itself mutates: from a space of optional interoperability into a bounded procedural domain, governed not by law but by the firm’s own tempo, syntax, and update logic.

At this point, discretion is not eliminated—but it is patterned, rhythmized, and protocol-bound.

2. Temporal Synchronization

Institutional actors begin calibrating their internal clocks to a firm’s developmental cadence.

As external ecosystems become dependent on the firm’s protocols, they also begin to align with its temporal rhythms. Regulatory agencies, academic programs, industrial labs, and capital markets time their roadmaps, reviews, or releases to synchronize with the firm’s internal design cycles. The result is cross-institutional synchronization—a de facto coordination layer without explicit centralization.

Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) updates reshape the scheduling of municipal infrastructure upgrades; Microsoft’s SDK release timelines delay government procurement and certification cycles.

Over time, these time-bound dependencies accumulate into a silent choreography—a condition in which institutions synchronize their calendars, workflows, and review cycles to the firm’s internal tempo.

The result is not overt coordination, but convergent rhythm. The firm becomes the infrastructural metronome: not merely setting the pace of innovation, but orchestrating the temporal structure of institutional responsiveness.

3. Executional Normalization

Public and private entities begin designing inside architectures they do not control, often without conscious awareness.

Over time, external actors begin to internalize the firm’s logic—not as an optional tool, but as a default cognitive and procedural framework. Government agencies write code through GitHub Copilot; AI curricula adopt CUDA as a foundational syntax; mobility planning conforms to Tesla’s fleet data.

These are not acts of conscious alignment. They are instances of institutional habituation—a condition in which public actors adopt private grammars of execution without contestation, often without awareness.

In this process, design space contracts. Alternative architectures are not evaluated—they are rendered unintelligible. Over time, the very grammar of institutional execution becomes privately authored yet publicly normalized.

4. Substitutability Collapse

Structural exit from the dominant ecosystem becomes prohibitively costly, procedurally incoherent, or institutionally illegible.

The final mechanism is entrenchment through the collapse of substitutability.
Not in the conventional sense of switching costs, but in a deeper procedural and semantic sense: exiting the firm’s ecosystem requires reconstituting the institutional grammar—rebuilding technical vocabularies, validation standards, pedagogical models, and compliance protocols from the ground up.

This collapse becomes evident when regulators, school systems, or capital allocators face not a lack of options, but a lack of procedural intelligibility. Without the firm’s embedded logic, tools fail to interoperate, workflows fragment, and institutional action becomes illegible.

At this point, the firm is no longer a strategic option or partner. It is the silent infrastructure—the executional condition without which other institutions cannot remain functionally coherent.

Synthesis: From Market Actor to Design Substrate

Taken together, these mechanisms reveal that ecosystemal irreversibility is not a function of competitive superiority, market share, or intentional dominance. It is the unintentional institutionalization of design authority—a structural condition in which the firm’s executional grammar becomes the de facto boundary of procedural evolution. Others no longer merely integrate with the firm’s logic—they are delimited by it.

This is not dominance by power.
It is governance by design.

Theoretical Contributions

The concept of ecosystemic irreversibility offers three distinct contributions to the literatures of corporate strategy, institutional theory, and innovation ecosystems. By repositioning the firm not as a competitor within markets but as an infrastructural orchestrator of institutional execution, this framework reveals a latent structural transformation underway in contemporary capitalism.

1. Contribution to Corporate Strategy

Ecosystemal irreversibility reframes strategic advantage away from traditional logics of possession, positioning, or resource control. It does not treat executional superiority as a temporary edge, but as a structural precondition for institutional coherence.

In this reframed view, the most enduring form of advantage is executional non-substitutability: the condition in which a firm’s design logic becomes so deeply embedded that other actors cannot remain functionally operational without it.

Strategy, then, is no longer the art of outperforming rivals within markets. It becomes a practice of substrate engineering—the infrastructural composition of executional grammars that public and private systems must adopt, adapt to, and align with.

Substrate engineering is not about controlling assets; it is about scripting environments. It is not about differentiation; it is about conditioning what remains institutionally viable.

📘 Concept: Substrate Engineering
A strategic practice in which the firm designs executional conditions—grammars, protocols, update cadences—that other institutions must adopt to remain operationally coherent. It shifts corporate strategy from market competition to infrastructural authorship.

This moves beyond existing theories of platform advantage or modular architecture by positing irreversibility as a higher-order strategic state—one in which escape from the firm’s logic incurs systemic incoherence, not just economic inefficiency.

2. Contribution to Institutional Theory

Ecosystemic irreversibility illuminates a structural migration in the locus of institutional design authority. Where traditional institutional theory centers legitimacy in state-endorsed norms, policy frameworks, or field-level consensus (Scott, 2008; Thornton et al., 2012), this construct reveals a new source of institutional order: private architectural constraint. Legitimacy, in this formulation, is no longer granted by policy—it is generated through infrastructure.

When governments, universities, and regulators begin to operate inside logics authored by firms (e.g., CUDA in AI curricula, GitHub Copilot in compliance coding), institutional coordination becomes dependent upon private procedural architectures. This implies a reversal: not just firms adapting to institutions, but institutions adapting to firm-authored grammars of execution.

3. Contribution to the Theory of Innovation Ecosystems

The prevailing view of innovation ecosystems centers on value co-creation, collaborative advantage, and networked interdependence (Adner, 2017; Jacobides et al., 2018). Ecosystemic irreversibility extends this theory by shifting the analytical focus from voluntary collaboration to institutional conditioning.

It theorizes a late-stage evolution in ecosystem dynamics—where the ecosystem ceases to be a site of co-creation and instead becomes a logic-bound environment that others must structurally inhabit to remain viable. Ecosystems, in this view, do not merely enable innovation. They become the preconditions of institutional relevance across sectors.

This reframing moves innovation ecosystems from the domain of strategy execution to the realm of governance architecture.

Boundary Conditions

Ecosystemic irreversibility is not a universal condition. It emerges under specific structural and institutional configurations:

• Cross-sectoral Embeddedness: The ecosystem governs workflows that span multiple institutional domains (e.g., AI across education, defense, commerce).
• Protocolal Cadence: The firm’s architecture imposes a time structure—release cycles, update rhythms—on other institutions’ operations.
• Systemic Substitution Cost: Exiting the ecosystem would entail not mere switching, but institutional redesign.
• Transcendence of Market Role: The firm becomes an invisible yet operational governor—structuring institutional behavior beyond its industry of origin.

These boundary conditions distinguish ecosystemal irreversibility from traditional forms of dominance, lock-in, or customer dependency.

Illustrative Cases

While the concept is theoretical, several empirical instances exhibit its core features:

• NVIDIA (CUDA): Originally a GPU manufacturer, NVIDIA’s CUDA has become the standard grammar of execution in AI research, education, and government funding pipelines. Institutions no longer teach “GPU programming”—they teach CUDA. This is protocolal embedding at infrastructure scale.
• Microsoft (Azure + GitHub Copilot): Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure and development environments now shape public procurement logic, administrative workflows, and labor market reskilling. Its SDK release cadence governs deployment schedules within and across governments.
• Tesla (FSD, OTA Infrastructure): Tesla’s firmware updates influence municipal traffic systems, public safety protocols, and insurance regulation cycles. Its operational cadence dictates not only product functionality, but policy synchronization.
• Apple / Meta (UX and Identity Infrastructure): Through iOS, App Store governance, and Meta’s identity layers, both firms define user experience as procedural architecture. App design, biometric authentication, and even digital labor markets evolve within their constraints—without formal regulatory status.

Each example illustrates a distinct form of strategic irreversibility: other institutions can no longer act meaningfully outside the firm’s executional substrate. Their operational frames are not merely influenced—they are configured.

Concluding Proposition

Ecosystemic irreversibility marks a paradigmatic threshold—the point at which a firm ceases to act as a competitive agent and begins to function as a compositional substrate. It no longer seeks advantage within markets, but defines the executional grammar through which institutions themselves pursue relevance, coordination, and continuity.

At this inflection point, strategy becomes governance—not through formal authority or political power, but by prefiguring the viable range of institutional action. Discretion is no longer granted by policy, but framed by protocol. What firms design as executional logic becomes the de facto environment in which others must operate.

Here, architecture becomes policy—not by declaration, but by default. The innovation ecosystem ceases to be a collaborative domain and becomes an operational environment; not merely enabling action, but pre-conditioning it.

And thus, corporate design becomes institutional infrastructure. The ecosystemal substrate transcends its originating market role and begins to serve as a public operational frame—governing the cadence, compliance, and viability of actors far beyond the boundaries of the firm itself.

We therefore conclude with the following proposition:

When a firm’s innovation ecosystem becomes the executional precondition for the institutional operation of others, its strategy is no longer a means of market differentiation.

It becomes a source of institutional coherence, a grammar of procedural possibility, a substrate through which society organizes itself.

This is not influence. It is not scale. It is infrastructural authorship.

And at this threshold, strategy no longer describes how firms compete. It defines how institutions operate.

Strategy becomes infrastructure.

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📘 Terminological Definitions | Conceptual Hierarchy and Functional Clarification (Lee, 2025)

1. Innovation Ecosystem

⦿ Conventional Definition
“An innovation ecosystem is a set of interdependent actors (firms, institutions, individuals) and complementary assets that interact through both market and non-market mechanisms to enable innovation outcomes, where value creation and capture are co-determined by structural coordination and architectural alignment.”
(Adner, 2017; Jacobides et al., 2018; Autio et al., 2014)

⦿ Extended Definition (Lee, 2025)
“An innovation ecosystem is not merely a collaborative domain; it becomes a conditioned execution environment in which institutions align their operations with the design logic of a central actor. In this state, innovation is not simply enabled—it is orchestrated through structured interdependencies and embedded operational grammars that determine how institutions act, adapt, and remain functional.”

⦿ Distinction and Contribution

• Prior Focus: Collaborative innovation networks
• Extended Focus: An environment that conditions execution across actors
• Theoretical Contribution: Redefines the ecosystem as a system of executional coordination, enabling analysis of strategy as the design of institutional action parameters.

2. Executional Substrate

⦿ Definition and Conceptual Necessity (Lee, 2025)
“Executional substrate refers to a structurally embedded execution logic—comprising codified procedures, standardized rhythms, and procedural expectations—that becomes a necessary condition for action across multiple institutions. It is not an auxiliary tool, but the operational basis that other actors must adopt in order to function coherently within shared domains.”

⦿ Core Components

• Execution Logic: Standards and procedures are internalized by external institutions
• Codified Procedures: Repetitive adoption of predefined rules, forming default operational norms
• Temporal Rhythm: Synchronization of execution timing with substrate-defined update cycles
• Necessary Adoption: Institutional functionality requires compliance with the substrate logic

⦿ Distinction and Contribution

• Not a technical platform or legal norm, but an executional precondition
• Strategic Contribution: Theorizes strategy as the structural authorship of execution, extending beyond market positioning to design of operational possibility.

3. Ecosystemic Irreversibility

⦿ Extended Definition (Lee, 2025)
“Ecosystemic irreversibility is a condition in which an executional substrate becomes non-substitutable and non-reconstructible across institutional domains, establishing the irreversible entrenchment of one actor’s operational logic as the common procedural ground for others. In this state, institutional discretion survives in form, but is functionally bounded by the adopted executional logic.”

⦿ Operational Mechanisms

• Entrenched Norms: Execution standards become default behavioral rules across institutions
• Exit Infeasibility: Alternative modes of execution vanish; procedural exit is structurally impossible
• Substitution Collapse: No viable alternative can replicate or replace the substrate’s logic
• Institutional Absorption: External institutions are absorbed into foreign design logic, losing executional autonomy

⦿ Distinction and Contribution

• From: Technological lock-in and economic switching costs
• To: Structural entrenchment of execution, across procedures, standards, and rhythms
• Theoretical Contribution: Clarifies how corporate design logic becomes the institutional norm, theorizing the irreversible capture of executional sovereignty.

📊 Conceptual Summary Table: Comparative Definition and Strategic Contribution

Term	Definition Summary (Lee, 2025)	Distinction from Prior Concepts	Theoretical Contribution
Innovation Ecosystem	A conditioned execution environment governed by embedded logic	From collaboration model → to executional alignment	Defines ecosystems as executional spaces, not interaction spaces
Executional Substrate	Structurally embedded logic required for institutional action	From external tools → to internalized necessity	Introduces strategy as design of executional conditions
Ecosystemic Irreversibility	Executional logic becomes non-substitutable and functionally irreversible	From lock-in → to institutional executional captivity	Theorizes irreversible executional subordination

Conclusion: Three-Stage Evolution of Execution-Based Strategy

1. Innovation Ecosystem
   → Formation of conditioned execution environments
2. Executional Substrate
   → Structural embedding of executional logic
   → Action becomes possible only within designed parameters
3. Ecosystemal Irreversibility
   → Execution becomes irreversibly locked,
   → Institutional discretion collapses into external procedural dependence

Strategic Implication:
Sovereignty is no longer defended through law or negotiation—it is authored through executional design.
Design defines who governs—and who merely executes.

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📚 References

Adner, R. (2017). Ecosystem as structure: An actionable construct for strategy. Journal of Management, 43(1), 39–58. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206316678451

Barney, J. B. (1991). Firm resources and sustained competitive advantage. Journal of Management, 17(1), 99–120. https://doi.org/10.1177/014920639101700108

Gawer, A., & Cusumano, M. A. (2002). Platform leadership: How Intel, Microsoft, and Cisco drive industry innovation. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Gawer, A., & Cusumano, M. A. (2014). Industry platforms and ecosystem innovation. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 31(3), 417–433. https://doi.org/10.1111/jpim.12105

Jacobides, M. G., Cennamo, C., & Gawer, A. (2018). Towards a theory of ecosystems. Strategic Management Journal, 39(8), 2255–2276. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.2904

Nelson, R. R., & Winter, S. G. (1982). An evolutionary theory of economic change. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Scott, W. R. (2008). Institutions and organizations: Ideas and interests (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Thornton, P. H., Ocasio, W., & Lounsbury, M. (2012). The institutional logics perspective: A new approach to culture, structure, and process. Oxford University Press.

Teece, D. J., Pisano, G., & Shuen, A. (1997). Dynamic capabilities and strategic management. Strategic Management Journal, 18(7), 509–533. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1097-0266(199708)18:7<509::AID-SMJ882>3.0.CO;2-Z

Zittrain, J. (2008). The future of the internet—and how to stop it. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

✳️ Related Works

Kogut, B., & Zander, U. (1992). Knowledge of the firm, combinative capabilities, and the replication of technology. Organization Science, 3(3), 383–397. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.3.3.383

Lessig, L. (1999). Code and other laws of cyberspace. Basic Books.

Srnicek, N. (2017). Platform capitalism. Polity Press.

Baldwin, C. Y., & Clark, K. B. (2000). Design rules: The power of modularity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Ansell, C., & Gash, A. (2008). Collaborative governance in theory and practice. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 18(4), 543–571. https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/mum032

Evans, P. C. & Gawer, A. (2016). The rise of the platform enterprise: A global survey. The Center for Global Enterprise. https://www.thecge.net/app/uploads/2016/01/PDF-WEB-Platform-Survey_01_12.pdf

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Citation

Lee, Y. D. (2025). Ecosystemal Irreversibility: Toward a Theory of Executional Substrate in Corporate Strategy.
New York Institute of Entrepreneurship and Technology (NYET).
First public disclosure: July 30, 2025.
https://mynyet.org/concepts/ecosystemal-irreversibility

Intellectual Property Notice

This article constitutes the first formal public disclosure of the concepts “Ecosystemal Irreversibility” and “Executional Substrate”, authored by Dr. Young D. Lee. Any use, citation, or derivative framework must appropriately acknowledge the original author and institution.

Contact: Dr.Lee@ket-nyet.org