The Innovation Ecosystem as a Source of Value Creation

Introduction

In an ecosystem, you can always intervene and change something but there’s no way of knowing what all the downstream effects will be or how they might affect the environment.

Richard Lewontin, DEFI-Écologique, undated

Borrowed from biology, the term ecosystem refers to a grouping of individuals and organizations that interact in dependent relationships to create innovations [MOO 96]. The actors are interconnected in the form of a network [BAS 09], linked to a large enterprise [IAN 04] or connected to each other via a digital platform [CEC 12].

Ecosystems have been present in the economy and management for decades, and in recent years they have been developing rapidly [JAC 18]. Well adapted to the imperatives of innovation and growth [GUI 17], they are of major interest to innovation actors and researchers. Economic actors, such as Nicolas Dufourcq, CEO of Bpifrance, or Jean-Lou Chameau, former president of CalTech, appreciate ecosystems for their organizational flexibility and the possible collaborations between economic actors, public agents and the territory [LEA 15].

Faced with this enthusiasm, work on meta-organizations, such as ecosystems, is approached through different concepts [GUL 12], leading to a diversity of definitions that prevents any consensus among researchers [OH 16]. In this logic, researchers study different aspects of ecosystems according to their field of research. However, two types of ecosystems dominate the literature: business ecosystems ...