Concept · Decision-Making Mental Models
Switching Costs
Origin: Porter / strategy
Biological Parallel
Hummingbirds develop specialized bill shapes and learned routes for specific flower types—switching to a new nectar source means abandoning embodied expertise and spatial memory. Acacia trees exploit this by evolving ant partnerships where ants can't survive elsewhere: the protection service comes with prohibitive switching costs. Symbiotic relationships from gut bacteria to mycorrhizal networks persist partly through biological lock-in—the cost of switching partners exceeds the benefit of optimizing the current arrangement.