Line of research: Operations Management and Sustainability

Competitive pressures increasingly force companies to innovate more and reduce their time-to-market. As a result, the open innovation approach is now the status quo and companies often adopt collaborative innovation practices to access knowledge and capabilities from customers and network partners located around the world to increase their innovation capacity and competitiveness. In this context, innovation ecosystems have gained in importance. Much attention is devoted to how established companies, startups, venture capitalists, business angels, banks, public sector agencies, universities and research centers interact and align their interests in order to innovate. For business leaders, the ecosystem is a source of winning ideas and a means of accelerating their innovative efforts. For their part, policymakers see it as a robust notion to guide the creation of policy mechanisms and actions to stimulate innovation. In academia, the concept has been studied in different fields and criticized for its lack of added value compared to existing notions in the field of innovation, such as innovation networks, for example. The aim of this course is to provide students with an overview of the literature on innovation ecosystems in order to promote an understanding of the theoretical lenses that underpin the study of this phenomenon and the differentiation of this concept from other relevant constructs, such as innovation networks, entrepreneurship ecosystems and supply chain management. To do this, we will explore definitions, differences between concepts, and assess the state of the art of this literature.