Fostering entrepreneurial innovation ecosystems: lessons learned from the European Institute of Innovation and Technology

Abstract

While business practices and management research has evolved towards more systemic approaches building on the notion of ecosystem to relate organisations with their complex operational environment, the linear model of innovation is still highly pervasive in governmental innovation policies. In this paper we contribute to the narrowing the research gap in the field on ecosystems by combining two often separate streams of literature and subsequently coining the term ‘entrepreneurial innovation ecosystems’. We then examine the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), a recent policy experiment aimed at developing Pan-European ecosystems to stimulate high-impact innovative entrepreneurship, which is done by integrating higher education, research and business activities (i.e. via knowledge triangle integration). While the high political profile of the EIT has constrained partly its freedom to experiment, a European-wide networked excellence and business logic in managing KICs has created new insights on experimental governance models that merit to be explored further. Building on an action research case study, the paper documents these developments and opens up an avenue for further work regarding experimental governance of Pan-European entrepreneurial innovation ecosystems.