Ecosystems, design, and glocalization: Amulti-level study of technovation

Abstract

Business ecosystems are an increasingly prominent organizational form in both management research and practice. A growing body of research exists about ecosystem design, but designing local ecosystem instances within a global ecosystem is not yet well understood or defined. This article contributes a multilevel, embedded case study of the global and local ecosystems anchored around the Technovation Girls competition - the world's largest technology entrepreneurship challenge for girls. We first define the process platform driving this ecosystem and anchoring the local instances. Second, we identify key architectural properties of a global-local ecosystem. Lastly, we specify a process for defining design rules in an organizational setting. In addition to theoretical relevance for ecosystem scholarship, our results are also of practical relevance to leaders of existing or nascent global ecosystems, who may benefit from techniques described in this paper that involve designing a flexible global ecosystemarchitecture that accommodates local variation.