Abstract
The emergence of technology increasingly depends on innovation ecosystems and frequently involves actors from both industry and academia. However, value creation may experience challenges due to bias formed during public-private innovation ecosystem genesis.This empirical study of bias in a new pan-European public-private initiative provides results regarding innovation ecosystems and the individuals typically active during their genesis: value creation is biased towards the selection of incumbent firms and complement challenges, and participation is biased towards engineers with knowledge of exploitation from multiple domains and researchers with knowledge of exploitation from single domains.This suggests that the implications of the loose coupling emphasised by the innovation ecosystems discourse and the knowledge of the different contexts in which firms capture value are more complex than previously acknowledged. The practical implications are that the ability of public innovation ecosystem leadership to act early on novel technology might be offset by the inability of involved firms to commit to bringing the technology to market and that individuals typically active during public-private innovation ecosystems genesis are not ideal for handling this challenge. In fact, increasingly connected public leadership could smother the innovation ecosystem unless well-connected and multidisciplinary researchers are brought in as brokers.
Highlights
The concept of innovation ecosystems has garnered much interest in recent years and in many ways offers a new and potentially fruitful perspective on innovation activities (Autio and Thomas, 2014)
This study focuses on the ecosystem built by the CPSELabs project, a pan-European initiative to link innovation ecosystems concerned with Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) (CPSELabs, 2020)
We focused on a case that matches many of the aspects highlighted by the innovation ecosystem discourse: it contains both supplier- and user-side participants (Autio and Thomas, 2014); it focuses on value creation through innovation (Autio and Thomas, 2014); and it has an open approach to combine technology into new products and services (Oh et al, 2016)
Summary
The concept of innovation ecosystems has garnered much interest in recent years and in many ways offers a new and potentially fruitful perspective on innovation activities (Autio and Thomas, 2014). Two areas with especially noticeable investigation needs are the genesis of the phenomenon (Dedehayir et al, 2018; Suominen et al, 2019) and its applicability to the cooperation between public and private organisations (Oh et al, 2016; Ritala and Almpanopoulou, 2017) In regard to the former, the roles that different actors take on are understudied (Dedehayir et al, 2018), and by extension which and why organisations are drawn into innovation ecosystems early. Public and private organisations have different incentives when engaging in innovation ecosystems, as they are driven by different “economies”
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