Imperial College London
Alternate

Professor Erkko Autio FBA

Business School

Chair in Technology Transfer and Entrepreneurship
 
 
 
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Contact

 

+44 (0)20 7594 1991erkko.autio CV

 
 
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Assistant

 

Ms Rachel Jury +44 (0)20 7594 5926

 
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Location

 

388Business School BuildingSouth Kensington Campus

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Summary

 

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@inbook{Thomas:2020,
author = {Thomas, LDW and Autio, E},
booktitle = {Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Business and Management},
editor = {Aldag},
publisher = {Oxford University Press},
title = {Innovation Ecosystems in Management: An Organizing Typology},
year = {2020}
}
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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - CHAP
AB  - The concept of an “ecosystem” is increasingly used in management and business to describe collectives of heterogeneous, yet complementary organizations who jointly create some kind of system-level output, analogous to an “ecosystem service” delivered by natural ecosystems, which extends beyond the outputs and activities of any individual participant of the ecosystem. Due to its attractiveness and elasticity, the ecosystem concept has been applied to a wide range of phenomena by a variety of scholarly perspectives and under varying monikers such as “innovation ecosystems,” “business ecosystems,” “technology ecosystems,” “platform ecosystems,” “entrepreneurial ecosystems,” and “knowledge ecosystems.” This conceptual and application heterogeneity has contributed to conceptual and terminological confusion, which threatens to undermine the utility of the concept in supporting cumulative insight.In this article, we seek to reintroduce some order into this conceptual heterogeneity by reviewing how the ecosystem concept has been applied to variably overlapping phenomena and by highlighting key terminological and conceptual inconsistencies and their sources. We find that conceptual inconsistency in the ecosystem terminology relates to two key dimensions: the “unit” of analysis and the type of “ecosystem service”—that is the ecosystem output collectively generated. We then argue that although there is considerable heterogeneity in application, the concept nevertheless offers promise in its potential to support insights that are distinctive relative to other concepts describing collectives of organizations, such as those of “industry,” “supply chain,” “cluster,” and “network.” We also find that despite such proliferation, the concept nevertheless describes collectives that are distinctive in that they uniq
AU  - Thomas,LDW
AU  - Autio,E
PB  - Oxford University Press
PY  - 2020///
TI  - Innovation Ecosystems in Management: An Organizing Typology
T1  - Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Business and Management
ER  -
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