Open Innovation in Ecosystems – A Service Science Perspective on Open Innovation

Abstract

Fostered by technological developments, a growing tendency towards interconnectedness of people, solutions, and organizations can be observed. In close alignment to this trend, the notion of ‘ecosystems’ is becoming popular to describe a system of complex relationships between diverse actors in analogy to natural ecosystems. With growing prominence of ecosystems, a stronger need for collaboration and co-creation beyond traditional supply chain networks is arising—including co-innovation amongst a diverse set of loosely coupled partners. Research in service science and on open innovation capture the topics of collaboration in systems and joint innovation, but still, open innovation research uses to focus on mainly firm-centric aspects of distributed innovation. The service ecosystems view, adopted by service science research, provides a means for studying how the co-creation of value is performed in systems of weakly tied actors. The purpose of this paper is to broaden the perspective of research in open innovation and to advance the understanding of open innovation in ecosystems by combining insights from service science research with the concept of open innovation. Consequently, this paper stems from four propositions that address gaps in knowledge related to the understanding of co-innovation in dynamic ecosystems of multiple actors and, thus, proposes directions for future research.