Development is a term that has been in use in European languages since the mid-17th century (according to Raymond Williams' scholarly review in Keywords) with meanings associated with "faculties of the human mind" and later in the new biology in close relation with ideas of evolution. Since then, it has grown into a large, often undefined concept ranging from economics and the notion of developing economies and societies in a progressive sense, the notion of stages of development in developmental psychology, referring initially to child psychology and child development, later applied across the age spectrum as a broader metaphor for lifelong development. Critiques include the notion that it imposes normative evaluations, comparative judgements and hierarchical stages and leads to pseudoscientific notions of progress and advancement and value judgements about forward and backward individuals, economies and societies. How do researchers, practitioners and theorists understand and use this complex and comprehensive term that has also become one of the key nebulous "plastic words" of a modular languages in Uwe Poerksen's definition or one of the "keywords" of modern culture and society in Raymond Williams' classic studies.
Dr. Di Nicola, your question confronts a gray area of serious explanation of something changing in an intuitive way such that the end result is expected to satisfactorily pardon the undefined (loaded) descriptor, "development." Stating the obvious: we usually think of development as the process in which a living system (we ignore the engineering refs.) is seen to change from a simple configuration to a somehow more complex one (behaviorally as well). The more interesting examples are the obscure ones.
A volcanic islet breaking the surface and persisting (stage 0) attracts seabirds which inoculate the ash with bacteria, chemicals and various plant seeds, some of which annuals may grow, etc. (stage 1). Other visitors will contribute additional factors from nearby sources: herbs appear, nests and rookeries follow (stage 2) and so on. This ecosystem development in stages is termed ecological succession (like societies, a food web + interspecies enabling contributions); it leads eventually to maturation, analogously to organism development (although I refuse to participate).
An animal embryo develops in stages through the addition of daughter cells of which probably half physically migrate to their peri-ultimate locations; an ecosystem recruits migrants to its nourishing niches, but the source in each case is irrelevant in the big picture. The nascent ecosystem is a developing living network, as is the embryo. Living networks (unalterably disjoint with techie nets) probabilistically improve their interconnections through which resources (primarily energy) are exchanged in their permutational forms specific to the type of entity/element (or node, if we must) and their coadapted correspondents.
Over time, however, network nodes become well interconnected, which condition results in relatively efficient exchanges at the cost of decreased flexibility in forming new connections => maturation. As the environment of existence changes, the relatively inflexible systems will tend to fail; the supple ones are more likely to adapt to the new conditions => evolution. All living systems exhibit these basic changes.
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