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 and innovation ecosystems.

The most studied is the business ecosystem. Analyses focus on the individual firm and its economic environment [TEE 07] in a logic of seeking resources to exploit in order to create customer value [APP 17]. The innovation ecosystem is concentrated on a value proposition driven by the focal firm of the business ecosystem, around which companies and start-ups from various fields of activity are rounded up [IAN 04]. Its main function is to develop a specific innovation [CLA 14] by integrating new technologies, captured from research institutes, from the crowd and from users via digital platforms.

The focal firm manages the mobility of knowledge, the design and appropriation of innovation, and the stability of the network [DHA 06]. For example, for Venkatraman and Lee [VEN 04], then Iyer and colleagues [IYE 06], the ecosystem is a network whose core is the focal firm. Focused on the co-creation of value, through products and services, for customers and markets, exploitation of resources and knowledge is privileged over exploration of new knowledge. This knowledge comes from scientific or technological ecosystems. In this context, strategies, mostly commercial, are driven by the business ecosystem. It is a source of competitive advantage for companies at an individual level [ADN 12].

Business and innovation ecosystems have the same objective: to create value and economic profitability [BEN 18] for the focal firm and its partners [SMI 13]. The ecosystem is defined as a “community of organizations, institutions, and individuals that impact the enterprise and the enterprise’s customers and supplies” [TEE 07]. The ecosystem represents an economic community of actors in interaction who influence each other through their activities [ADN 10].

Here, the studies focus on the spillover effects of these activities in terms of co-creation of innovation [MAC 13], knowledge transfer [ZAH 12], growth [TEE 14], resource and risk sharing [BEN 18] and access to markets [CLA 14]. From this point of view, only those relationships that favor the increase of this economic performance are studied [WEB 15]. Strategic actions performed by the actors are oriented towards competitive advantage [VAL 15].

Here, only innovations that are economically profitable in the market are developed. This strategic vision limits innovation to improvements of existing products or services through additional features. In an attempt to go beyond the boundaries of incremental innovation, studies of innovation ecosystems are oriented towards networks and research into their impact on the performance of innovation for the focal firm [SHA 20]. Attention is then directed towards focal innovation, on the components and additional features that support it [JAC 18]. New definitions of ecosystems are emerging, such as that of Adner, who defines an ecosystem as “the collaborative arrangements through which firms combine their individual offerings into a coherent, customer-facing solution” [ADN 06].

The emphasis is on the design of a basic product of the Minimum Viable Product¹ type and its functionalities. The services associated with it provide strong added value for end users [ADN 12]. Innovation ecosystems present a broad perspective of value creation [PAP 17], where collaboration and cooperation [DAI 17] are key success factors for actors in the ecosystem [SCH 20].

Work is intensifying on the coordination of actors and on the way they interact to create and disseminate innovations capable of optimally satisfying the end customer [KAP 17]. In this context, Adner developed his definition of the ecosystem and gave it a strategic dimension: “the alignment structure of the multilateral set of partners that need to interact in order for a focal value proposition to materialize” [ADN 17]. For the author, the alignment structure is “the extent to which there is mutual agreement among the members regarding positions and flows, ‘with the objective to secure its role’ in a competitive ecosystem” [ADN 17].

In the wake of Adner, the work of Jacobides and colleagues features a holistic vision. The authors focus on the complementarities of the different actors as well as on their nature and coordination [JAC 18]. However, these notions are little studied in ecosystems. The work of Adner [ADN 17] and Jacobides and colleagues [JAC 18] is complementary: the authors consider the creation of value as inherent to the actors in the ecosystem. Therefore, the combination of resources and skills has an impact on the interrelationships between actors and on the growth of the ecosystem itself.

Here, the ecosystem supports the improvement of innovation and its outcomes through the clustering of heterogeneous actors and the sharing of resources and core competencies via digital platforms [BAL 17]. Network effects and cooperation allow for increased access to products, services and end customers. If coordination is well orchestrated, long-term ecosystem growth is possible through sustained productivity and stability [ISC 13].

In parallel with this work, in the tradition of Clarysse and colleagues [CLA 14], who highlighted the presence of three ecosystems of differing natures, Valkokari shows the importance of the roles played by these three interacting ecosystems in innovation [VAL 15]: the business ecosystem is at the heart of the development of innovation. It can be service or industrial, depending on the value proposition of the focal firm. For the author, the business ecosystem focuses on the creation of value for the market. In this context, large companies are perceived as key partners. The expected results are economic and support competitive advantage. The innovation ecosystem is dependent on the business ecosystem. It appears as an integrating mechanism between the exploration of new knowledge and its exploitation for value creation in the business ecosystem. For the author, innovation decision-makers, local intermediaries, innovation brokers and funding agencies are the key players in the innovation ecosystem. Finally, the knowledge ecosystem focuses on the creation of new knowledge that can be integrated by the innovation ecosystem into the business ecosystem where it can be exploited for innovation.

R&D centers and technological entrepreneurs play a central role in the knowledge ecosystem. Entrepreneurs are seen as an “alternative mode of exploring new activities” [FER 17]. Valkokari highlights the recursive relationships that are created between the three ecosystems, the multidimensional nature of the interactions and interdependencies between actors. She places great emphasis on the knowledge borne by the actors and the knowledge they develop through innovation.

However, as in most of the work on ecosystems, there remains a lack of consensus on the definition of the innovation ecosystem. Assimilated to the business ecosystem, most work remains focused on the focal firm and its digital platform. However, some actors generate disruptive innovations without being orchestrated by a focal firm.

Many works focus on performance and customer-oriented value creation [APP 17] rather than on the mechanisms of knowledge creation and transfer. The ownership of innovation by each specific “community” of actors – scientists, technologists and business people – is not really addressed. Similarly, the in-depth role of the network in the innovation ecosystem, its extension and stability are not discussed, with the exception of the work of Pellinen and colleagues [PEL 12] or Azzam and colleagues [AZZ 17].

Other studies are interested in the co-evolution of actors’ innovative capacities. However, few studies have reported on how they adapt and create interdependencies within the ecosystem [JAC 18]. While relationships and interdependencies have been extensively studied, the innovation process, which takes innovation from discovery to market, is not particularly addressed in innovation ecosystems. Similarly, the transfer of results, material assets and knowledge from one ecosystem to another, and the creation of value through strategies developed and implemented by these actors, have not been studied in depth.

The aim of this book is to make a modest contribution to these various shortcomings through nine chapters that can be read separately or in combination.

Chapter 1 defines the innovation ecosystem in terms of the nature of the actors who “inhabit” it [MUE 13] through four key examples.

Chapter 2 focuses on the evolution of the innovation ecosystem and the combination of the three ecosystems – scientific, technological and commercial – that compose it.

Chapter 3 presents a modeling of the innovation ecosystem. It shows the relationships between the three ecosystems and its articulations via the iterative network, the integrated value chain and the deployment of the innovation process.

Chapter 4 is devoted to the actors of the innovation ecosystem, their roles, their activities and the links they create to develop innovation.

Chapter 5 relates to the search for coherence between the situations of design and actors’ capacities. It deals with the construction of pool and reciprocal interdependencies that they develop to innovate.

Chapter 6 focuses on the emergence of the iterative network anchored in collaboration. It shows how actors overcome the barriers of collaboration to create “small worlds” that will open up a typology of collaborations orchestrated by pooling and reciprocal interdependencies. This chapter discusses the dimensions and extension of the iterative network within the innovation ecosystem.

Chapter 7 studies the transfers of material assets and knowledge that take place within the innovation ecosystem and between the three ecosystems via an integrated value chain. This chain is anchored in the knowledge borne and developed by the various actors in the innovation ecosystem. It highlights the transfer processes, both in terms of content and context, at work in the innovation ecosystem, as well as the roles of the actors in this integrated value chain.

Chapter 8 returns to innovation and the challenges that actors face in terms of orientation and strategic choices.

Chapter 9 discusses the balancing act between opportunism and reciprocity. It shows the limits of the focal firm and the diversity of value creation fostered by collaboration. It shows how this value creation is articulated between decontextualization of knowledge and its recontextualization in order to generate value shared by all the actors of the innovation ecosystem.