Innovation ecosystem dissertation

To achieve a complex value proposition, innovating firms often need to rely on other actors in their innovation ecosystem. This raises many new challenges for the managers of these firms. However, there is not yet a comprehensive approach that would support managers in the process of analysis and decision making on ecosystem strategy.

In doing so, we integrate the views and implications arising from recent scholarly work on ecosystems (e.g., Adner, 2017; Jacobides et al., 2018) and instrumentalize the innovation ecosystem concept for both practical and academic use. The paper proceeds as follows.

In this paper, we develop a strategy tool to map, analyze and design (i.e., model) innovation ecosystems. From the scholarly literature, we distill the constructs and relationships that capture how actors in an ecosystem interact in creating and capturing value.

Building on the insight that the operating logic of any given innovation ecosystem is dependent on the properties of the individual actors as well as the properties of the ecosystem network ( Adner, 2006; Dattée et al., 2018 ), we distinguished constructs and their relationships at the ecosystem level (EL) and the actor level (AL). Fig. 1.