In defense of ‘eco’ in innovation ecosystem

By Paavo Ritala, Argyro Almpanopoulou. 2017

265 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Innovation ecosystem is an increasingly popular but all too often ambiguously utilized concept across academia, policy and business. In their recent well-argued critique of the concept, Oh et al. (2016) called it a “flawed analogy” that is potentially dangerous for its lack of rigor. In this letter, we reflect on this critique and examine pathways to resolve some of the issues pointed out. We suggest that, at its best, the ecosystem analogy combines salient features from natural ecology to inform the design of system-level innovation management activities. This requires a great deal of conceptual and empirical rigor, and we outline a number of ideas for future research in this regard.

Subfields: Management of Technology and Innovation, Management Science and Operations Research, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/db1fa66593c792ad2eb876a7a281e261f0a61b2b

Citations in the corpus

• Innovation ecosystems: A conceptual review and a new definition (2020, unknown): “Ritala and Almpanopoulou (2017) agree with the critique that the concept is used ambiguously, but suggest that the concept may nevertheless provide a useful addition to the conceptualizations of innovation and innovation management, and call for more conceptual and empirical rigor.”