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Abstract: The ecosystem approach to innovation and business ecosystem has emerged as prominent research avenue departing from the extant literature on innovation and management. The broad adoption of ecosystem terminology has increased the conceptual ambiguity of the terminology to where ecosystems are used fairly loosely, even as buzz or decoration to the core message. This study tackles the use of ecosystem terminology and structures the conceptual frame for the field, identifying definitions of an innovation ecosystem and how the concept has been founded in previous literature. Our results highlight how the ecosystem theory, while showing value adding elements, rests heavily on a few seminal works, but both empirical and conceptual advancements are needed before a coherent theory.
Keywords: innovation system; ecosystem; review; innovation ecosystem; cocitation; bibliographic coupling
1 Introduction
The ecosystem perspective to innovation and business has emerged as the secret sauce of innovative organizations. To some, it represents a departure from extant literature of innovation and strategic management on the governance of industrial and innovative effort, while there are critical voices on the added value of the ecosystem approach (Oh et al. 2016). Ecosystems offer a systems approach to innovation by focusing on how a network of actors create and sustain competitive advantage independently and as a participant to a system of actors who are not hierarchically managed (Jacobides et al. 2014), but rather act towards their own goals. The broad adoption of the ecosystem concept has resulted in conceptual ambiguity in what are meant by innovation ecosystems and how, if in any way, do these differ from the existing systems approaches to innovation (Lundvall 1985; Freeman 2004). This study tackles the ambiguous use of ecosystem terminology and structures the conceptual frame for the field, identifying definitions of an innovation ecosystem and how the concept has been founded in previous literature.
We focus on three research questions:
1) What are the shared theoretical foundations in the different streams of innovation systems literature?
2) Where does the ecosystem approach depart from extant literature on innovation and strategic management of innovation systems?
3) What are the definitions of innovation and business ecosystems?
The study follows the literature review approach and is based on a strong empirical bibliometric analysis followed by a qualitative analysis of...