Absorptive capacity is the ability to take an innovation whose value has already become visible and do everything after extraordinarily well — mobilize capital around it, integrate it into infrastructure, scale manufacturing, lower cost, coordinate supply chains, improve reliability, and deploy it across a huge market. It is a real and formidable competence, and distinct from the generative capacity that protects an illegible deviation before anyone knows it matters. One ecology can discover a new technological road while another builds the highway; both are achievements, and in the mature phase the builder can outperform the discoverer.
The consequence worth naming is a hidden dependency. An ecology specialized in absorption and scaling may partly rely on other ecologies remaining capable of unauthorized emergence — an implicit global division of labor in which one field bears the social cost of experimentation and another captures the value of operationalizing the survivors. That is not exploitation in a moral sense, since knowledge circulates, but it is a genuine ecological transfer, and it stays invisible while global knowledge flows freely — surfacing sharply if technological blocs seal, or at a frontier where there is no proven model left to import.