Abstract
The concept of innovation ecosystems has become popular during the last 15 years, leading to a debate regarding its relevance and conceptual rigor, not the least in this journal. The purpose of this article is to review received definitions of innovation ecosystems and related concepts and to propose a synthesized definition of an innovation ecosystem. The conceptual analysis identifies an unbalanced focus on complementarities, collaboration, and actors in received definitions, and among other things proposes the additional inclusion of competition, substitutes, and artifacts in conceptualizations of innovation ecosystems, leading to the following definition: An innovation ecosystem is the evolving set of actors, activities, and artifacts, and the institutions and relations, including complementary and substitute relations, that are important for the innovative performance of an actor or a population of actors. This definition is compatible with related conceptualizations of innovation systems and natural ecosystems, and the validity of it is illustrated with three empirical examples of innovation ecosystems.
Keywords
EcosystemRelevance (law)Set (abstract data type)Conceptual frameworkKnowledge managementCompetition (biology)Conceptual modelBusinessSociologyComputer sciencePolitical scienceEcologySocial science
Affiliated Institutions
Related Publications
Towards a theory of ecosystems
Research Summary: The recent surge of interest in “ecosystems” in strategy research and practice has mainly focused on what ecosystems are and how they operate. We complement th...
The changing role of the health care customer: review, synthesis and research agenda
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to synthesize findings from health care research with those in service research to identify key conceptualizations of the changing role of t...
STRATEGIC CHANGE COMMUNICATION USING A NOVEL BUSINESS NARRATIVE MODELLING LANGUAGE
This conceptual paper is developed in the realm of strategic change communication. The purpose of this paper is to present our Business Narrative Modelling Language (BNML) (Oliv...
The Impact of Market Knowledge Competence on New Product Advantage: Conceptualization and Empirical Examination
Although the role of market knowledge competence in enhancing new product advantage is assumed widely in the literature, empirical studies are lacking because of an absence of t...
Market, Hierarchy, and Trust: The Knowledge Economy and the Future of Capitalism
Recent conceptualizations of trends in the structure of U.S. industry have focused on the relative importance of markets, hierarchies, and hybrid intermediate forms. This paper ...
Publication Info
- Year
- 2019
- Type
- review
- Volume
- 90-91
- Pages
- 102098-102098
- Citations
- 1024
- Access
- Closed
External Links
Social Impact
Altmetric
PlumX Metrics
Social media, news, blog, policy document mentions
Citation Metrics
1024
OpenAlex
Cite This
Ove Granstrand,
Marcus Holgersson
(2019).
Innovation ecosystems: A conceptual review and a new definition.
Technovation
, 90-91
, 102098-102098.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.technovation.2019.102098
Identifiers
- DOI
- 10.1016/j.technovation.2019.102098