We have run the ClusterOS diagnostic across 75 clusters — cyber security ecosystems in Belfast, Tel Aviv, Cheltenham, Singapore, and San Francisco; advanced manufacturing in the Basque Country; the Cambridge tech ecosystem; Orlando's ten innovation clusters; and more. The finding that surprised us most is not what each ecosystem is doing wrong. It is how consistently they do the same things.
Diagnostics completed across North America, Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Australasia. Sectors include cyber security, advanced manufacturing, space technology, medtech, digital media, agtech, photonics, simulation & training, and regional innovation ecosystems.
Across 75 diagnostics, we tracked which of the nine canonical stalls appeared in each cluster. The distribution is not even. Three stalls dominate — present across virtually every geography, sector, and maturity level we have encountered.
"Narrative × Activity is the most frequently identified stack across all 75 diagnostics. It appears in mature ecosystems and emerging ones. It appears in ecosystems with strong university anchors and in those with corporate anchors. Geography, sector, and maturity level do not predict its presence. Something else does."
These are not sector findings or regional findings. They are system-level patterns — dynamics that appear regardless of what a cluster makes, who funds it, or where it sits.
Individual stalls are informative. Stacks — mutually reinforcing combinations — are where the diagnostic produces its most actionable findings. These are the configurations we encounter most frequently.
The most surprising output of comparative diagnostics is structural resemblance — pairs of ecosystems in different countries, different sectors, different political contexts, that show almost identical behavioural configurations. The resemblance is not in what they produce. It is in how the system stabilises.
"Once the stabilisation logic becomes visible, similar patterns can be seen in many other ecosystems — sometimes with different labels, different justifications, and different political dynamics, but with remarkably similar behavioural structure. That recognition is where stewardship begins."
Pattern consistency across 75 diagnostics has a practical implication: your ecosystem is more predictable than it looks. The diagnostic does not need to start from scratch. It applies a framework refined across dozens of ecosystems to identify which patterns are operating in yours — and where the specific leverage points are.
The diagnostic identifies your stalls, names your stack, and generates leverage hypotheses calibrated to your specific configuration — informed by every ecosystem we have diagnosed before it.
Request a diagnostic10 clusters, 582 evidence items, three cross-cluster patterns, two behavioural stacks, and a prioritised leverage hypothesis. A full ClusterOS diagnostic summary — based on public evidence alone.