Line of Research: Operations Management and Sustainability

Competitive pressures are forcing companies to innovate continuously and reduce their time-to-market. In this scenario, open innovation has become the status quo, and collaborative practices have been widely adopted to access the knowledge and capabilities of customers and partners in different parts of the world, increasing innovation capacity, competitiveness and, more recently, sustainability. In this context, innovation ecosystems have gained prominence. More and more attention is being paid to how companies established on platform models, their complementors, startups, venture capitalists, angels, banks, public agencies, universities and research centers interact and align interests to generate innovation. For business leaders, the ecosystem represents a strategic source of ideas and a means of accelerating innovative efforts. For policymakers, it is a robust concept for guiding public policies, tools and actions to stimulate innovation. In academia, the concept has been explored in different fields, but also criticized for its overlap with already consolidated notions, such as innovation networks. The aim of this course is to provide students with an overview of the literature on innovation ecosystems, promoting an understanding of the theoretical lenses that underpin this field and the differences in relation to other relevant constructs, such as innovation networks, knowledge ecosystems, entrepreneurship ecosystems and supply chain management. To this end, we will explore definitions, conceptual distinctions and the state of the art in the literature. In addition, we will discuss how the concept of ecosystems, their orchestration and benefits have been extended to new contexts, such as the circular economy and smart cities, analyzing their applicability in these scenarios as well.