The City as an Experimental Environment: The Identification, Selection, and Activation of Distributed Knowledge in Regional Open Innovation Ecosystems

Ben Robaeyst,Bastiaan Baccarne,Dimitri Schuurman,Wout Duthoo

doi:10.3390/su13126954

Abstract

Over the past decade, open innovation (OI) literature has extended its scope beyond strictly economic contexts to the context of societal value creation. This has given rise to the notion of (local) distributed knowledge as a driver for sustainable innovation and has highlighted the importance of multi-stakeholder collaborations in new product development (NPD) processes to develop new ICT systems for complex urban issues. Several studies have discussed sustainable stakeholder ecosystem architectures for such collaborations. However, little is known about stakeholder identification and selection processes for collaborations in the urban environment. By combining action research with a case study design, this paper studies the nature of contextualized interactions between knowledge actors in the ecosystem and the processes of attraction, identification, selection, and activation of stakeholders in an urban living lab (ULL). These insights converge in the development of a ‘stakeholder acupuncture framework’, which structures mechanisms and practices within dynamic collaboration ecosystems and defines key boundary conditions for such open-ended ecosystems.

Highlights

Henry Chesbrough [1] introduced the open innovation (OI) concept as a model for organizing technological innovation and argued that firms should make use of internal and external ideas, as well as internal and external paths to market, in order to advance their technologies
We conceptualized and appointed this mechanism in relation to the concept of urban acupuncture originally coined by Manuel de Solà-Morales Rubio [44] in an urban planning context
In our case study, which focused on the micro-dynamics of social OI in the context of a quadruple helix regional innovation project, we found that an imbalance occurred in terms of the fourth helix

Summary

Introduction

Henry Chesbrough [1] introduced the open innovation (OI) concept as a model for organizing technological innovation and argued that firms should make use of internal and external ideas, as well as internal and external paths to market, in order to advance their technologies. Further studies have pointed out that participating in such collaborations or OI networks has multiple beneficial returns for a firm’s innovative performance (e.g., for new product development processes, for increasing patent rates, and for improving existing products) [2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. The pressure on urban areas to be drivers for societal change and accelerated innovation is systematically increasing [12]

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