This paper uses the method of main path and content analysis to analyze the important scholars, influential journals and key literatures in the field of innovation ecosystem. The theoretical development skeleton of innovation ecosystem research has been clearly constructed. The study shows that the innovation ecosystem theory, as a new field of research, is developing rapidly. The research focuses on three new fields: business, technology and service innovation ecosystem. The research early focused on strategic management and innovation systems, but it focuses on the ecology of various disciplines now. Value co-creation gradually becomes the main driving force to promote the development of innovation ecosystem. Further, based on the structural analysis of documents, the paper constructs a panoramic theoretical framework for the development of the innovation ecosystem from the perspectives of innovation, driving factors, innovation subject, innovation structure, innovation community and innovation risk, putting forward the future research direction of the innovation ecosystem.
With the increasingly fierce global competition, more and more enterprises realize that they can enhance their core competitiveness and create business value through a healthy ecosystem. American scholar Moore first puts forward the new concept of “business ecosystem” in 1993. The emergence of business ecosystem provides a new perspective for enterprises and creates a unique business operation model (Adner, 2006; Singer, 2006; Horn, 2005). In the business ecosystem, successful companies can create a “platform” (service, tool, or technology domain, etc.) that allows technology to flow throughout the ecosystem, allowing other ecosystem members to use the platform to achieve their business goals (Moore, 1993; Iansiti and Levien, 2004). Subsequently, the concept of technology ecosystem was proposed and used to describe the relationship between technology and organization. Rosenkopf and Tushman use the system view to analyze inter-organizational relationships and study the co-evolution of technology and organization. In addition, some researchers argue that technology cannot be analyzed in isolation. Dosi’s paradigm, Nelson’s & Winter’s technological systems and Sood’s & Tellis’ platform innovations all emphasize evolutionary analysis of technology as a system. Finally, with the concept of service ecosystem emerges, which is defined as “Create interconnected, relatively independent and self-regulated resource integration systems (Vargo & Akaka, 2012) by sharing institutional logic and common values exchanged through services”, which emphasize that in order to survive, enterprises need to change themselves and resolve conflicts among different roles in the management service ecosystem. To manage these conflicts, Lusch and Nambisan (2015) point out that service ecosystem needs to develop and maintain a “shared worldview” among participants and implement a “participatory architecture” or a service platform to coordinate. At the same time, some researchers have noted that there may be tensions among participants in the service ecosystem due to lack of coordinated guidance to their institutions (Solomon, Surprenant, Czepiel & Gutman, 1985; Venkatesh, Penaloza & Firat, 2006; Vargo & Lusch, 2011).
Nevertheless, there are still many deficiencies and gaps in the study of innovation ecosystem. First of all, the research on innovation ecosystem is still focus on case studies, and theoretical research is at the stage of exploration. Secondly, based on the different perspectives chosen by different authors, the research of innovation ecosystem is dispersed, and it is weakly related to the theory, which weakens the possibility of communication between literature and theory. This paper combs the development path of innovation ecosystem knowledge through the main path method and extends the theoretical framework of the knowledge based on existing theories. Finally this paper builds a framework for the development of innovative ecosystem.
The main contributions of this study are three aspects. First, we present 3 innovation ecosystem development scenarios from previous studies. Second, we demonstrate a novel way of analyzing an academic discipline through citation data. The proposed multiple path method complements and increases the value of the traditional main path methodology. Finally, this paper analyzes the innovation ecosystem through six aspects, and constructs a complete theoretical system block diagram. Through the development of the main path of innovation ecosystem and the combing of the theoretical framework, it can provide new ideas for enterprises to achieve value creation in the future.
To explore the development and evolution of a field, Bibliometrics is a very basic and effective research method. It involves general statistical analysis of relevant research, such as the overall development trend of the field, national distribution, journal distribution and High-yielding scholars. In addition, Bibliometrics is also widely used in scientific research evaluation. This quantitative analysis is objective and clear [
This study applies two citation-based methodologies: the main path method and the measurement of different indexes to reveal the law of its development [
In the course of scientific fields’ development, several ideas and opinions are proposed continuously. Along the way, some ideas stay and some fade away. Those opinions that stay usually raise wide and long-lasting attention. This study can find ideas that are proposed in the course of innovation ecosystem development stay and make a significant influence upon this field.
The main path method is different from the traditional literature coupling and co-citation methods. The main path method is more concerned with the connections among nodes in the citation network. Hummon and Doreian (1989) [
In this paper, TLCS (total local citation score), TGCS (total global citation) and h-index were used to measure the innovation ecosystem. The higher the citation frequency, the more important the author is in this field. And then the Authorities and Hubs indicators can provide a new perspective which is determine the vertex importance by adjacent points. Authorities are important recipients of the literature and Hubs are important senders which connected with important Authorities. The academic paper could become an important node in the innovation ecosystem literature, if the node is an important recipient and dissemination point of the literature [
In this paper, the growth curve method is commonly used to project the lifecycle of a physical or social system. Moreover, the future development trend of knowledge is revealed through the analysis of the growth curve of the published literatures in the field of innovation ecosystem. Growth curve analysis is based on the assumption that the growth of objects in a system such as human population growth on earth, bacteria expansion in laboratories. In this approach, when a system develops to a certain degree, resource scarcity and environmental factors will inhibit further growth. It is generally believed that the growth of scientific articles is not at the same rate. It increases a little slow in the beginning. At a certain point, it speeds up exponentially. After passing the “midpoint” (where the growth rate inflects), the growth slows down and eventually reaches a growth limit point. The growth curve has a good match between the logical function and the time series data, so that scholars are able to predict the growth limit, the midpoint, and the life cycle of an S-shaped curve [
Mathematically, an S-shaped curve can be represented with a logistic function:
S ( t ) = k 1 + exp [ − ( ln ( 81 ) / t ) ( t − t m ) ] (1)
where k is the growth limit; tm is the midpoint of the growth trajectory; and Dt, the lifecycle, is defined as the time the development takes to grow from 10% to 90% of the growth limit.
The data source of this paper is web of science database, which is the most authoritative and important citation information database in the world. Around the theme of innovation ecosystem research, according to the search strategy of “theme = innovation ecosystem*”, “type of literature = Article” “the time span = all year”, “database = SCI-EXPANDED, SSCI, A&HCI, CPCI-S, CPCI-SSH, CCR-EXPANDED, IC”, for data retrieval of relevant literature retrieval. We obtained a total of 1655 articles. In order to explore the present and future trends of the innovation ecosystem, this paper makes a statistical analysis of the literature published in the field of innovation ecosystem. On the whole, the number of publications on the theme of innovation ecosystem presents a gradual upward trend, as shown in
Based on the statistical data of the number of paper published over the years in innovation ecosystem, this paper make full use of the logistic growth curve to predict the trend of papers in the field of innovation ecosystem. From
Firstly, this paper analyzes the overall situation of the innovation ecosystem. In the field of innovation ecosystem, a total of 6035 authors produced 2030 articles to the deadline. These authors are mainly concentrated in the United States, Britain, China, Canada, Europe and other countries. Many researchers have contributed to the innovation ecosystem field during its development. We apply the TLCS, the TGCS and the h-index to recognize researchers’ contribution and
influence.
Authors | TLCS | TGCS | H index | Frequencya |
---|---|---|---|---|
Adner R | 194 | 529 | 13 | 24/1375/1345/1174/1161/57.29 |
Kapoor R | 109 | 289 | 6 | 20/380/370/339/332/19 |
Gawer A | 69 | 212 | 7 | 9/374/365/303/298/41.56 |
Iansiti Marco | 53 | 239 | 4 | 8/322/322/314/314/40.25 |
Levien Roy | 53 | 239 | 1 | 1/243/243/243/243/243 |
Cusumano MA | 52 | 164 | 18 | 55/975/965/882/875/17.73 |
Nambisan S | 51 | 179 | 21 | 72/1454/1422/1280/1260/20.19 |
Basole RC | 44 | 143 | 8 | 38/367/301/301/281/9.66 |
Teece DJ | 39 | 1869 | 25 | 49/6891/6782/6009/5977/140.63 |
Bush AA | 33 | 122 | 20 | 283/1986/1802/1659/1582/7.02 |
Konsynski B | 33 | 122 | 20 | 96/2186/2155/1921/1909/22.77 |
Tiwana A | 33 | 122 | 25 | 81/2093/2005/1748/1710/25.84 |
Vargo SL | 33 | 203 | 23 | 53/5323/5155/2918/2880/100.43 |
Akaka MA | 30 | 69 | 6 | 6/168/164/121/119/28 |
Ceccagnoli M | 28 | 65 | 8 | 15/433/420/383/374/28.87 |
aFrequency = Total Publications/Sum of Times Cited/Without self citations/Citing articles/Without self citations/Average citations per item. Data sources: Using Pajek tools to sort out data.
At the same time, these articles are distributed in 1031 journals, mainly involving 20 areas, such like economics, management, information science and ecology and so on. It shows that the field of innovation ecosystem is more multidisciplinary. We apply again the TLCS index, TGCS index and h-index to identify the influential journals published in the field of innovation ecosystem (as shown in
In this paper, the key literature in the field of innovation ecosystem is identified by means of set point (Authorities) and dissemination point (Hubs).Authorities refer to the articles that cited by a lot of articles, and that means it is important to spread the knowledge [
Journals | TLCS | TGCS | H-index |
---|---|---|---|
HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW | 151 | 853 | 11 |
STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT JOURNAL | 143 | 4025 | 8 |
MIS QUARTERLY | 68 | 312 | 9 |
RESEARCH POLICY | 50 | 238 | 8 |
JOURNAL OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY | 40 | 117 | 6 |
COLLABORATION AND COMPETITION IN BUSINESS ECOSYSTEMS | 39 | 55 | 6 |
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TECHNOLOGY MANAGEMENT | 36 | 238 | 8 |
JOURNAL OF PRODUCT INNOVATION MANAGEMENT | 36 | 109 | 4 |
INFORMATION SYSTEMS RESEARCH | 35 | 137 | 3 |
TECHNOVATION | 35 | 124 | 6 |
CALIFORNIA MANAGEMENT REVIEW | 32 | 280 | 5 |
MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW | 28 | 96 | 3 |
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA | 28 | 1253 | 9 |
ECOSYSTEMS | 25 | 1955 | 19 |
R & D MANAGEMENT | 24 | 166 | 5 |
Data sources: Using Pajek tools to sort out data.
Hubs and Authorities, Li YR, 2009 The technological roadmap of Cisco’s business ecosystem; Basole RC, 2009 Visualization of interfirm relations in a converging mobile ecosystem, Adner R, 2010 Value creation in innovation ecosystems: how the structure of technological interdependence affects firm performance in new technology generations, Dedehayir O, 2011 Measuring industry clockspeed in the systemic industry contex, West J, 2013 Evolving An Open Ecosystem: the Risk and Fall of the Synbian Platform, Makinen SJ, 2013 Business Ecosystems’ Evolution―An Ecosystem Clockspeed Perspective etc., have high values of both Authorities and Hubs’ values, which shows that these papers are actually vital nodes in the field of innovation ecosystem.
Further, this paper makes a statistical analysis of the major countries and research institutes in the field of innovative ecosystems, revealing the relationship between the development of innovative ecosystems and the existence of countries. As the economic downturn in Japan and the rebounded in the United States after the 1990s, the sustained development of Silicon Valley (world innovation center) has a great impact on the traditional innovation model. The introduction of the concept of business ecosystem enlightens researchers and policy makers of national innovation. In 2004, the United States released a series of research reports entitled “Consolidating the National Innovation Ecosystem. It
Authories | Papers | Hubs | Papers |
---|---|---|---|
0.056732 | West J, 2013, ADV STRATEG MANAGE, V30, P27 | 0.652523 | West J, 2013, ADV STRATEG MANAGE, V30, P27 |
0.090003 | Li YR, 2009, TECHNOVATION, V29, P379 | 0.106831 | Li YR, 2009, TECHNOVATION, V29, P379 |
0.094283 | Basole RC, 2009, J INF TECHNOL, V24, P144 | 0.106831 | Basole RC, 2009, J INF TECHNOL, V24, P144 |
0.704588 | Adner R, 2010, STRATEGIC MANAGE J, V31, P306 | 0.106831 | Adner R, 2010, STRATEGIC MANAGE J, V31, P306 |
0.065454 | Dedehayir O, 2011, TECHNOVATION, V31, P627 | 0.292808 | Dedehayir O, 2011, TECHNOVATION, V31, P627 |
0.121507 | Makinen SJ, 2013, ADV STRATEG MANAGE, V30, P99 | 0.351501 | Makinen SJ, 2013, ADV STRATEG MANAGE, V30, P99 |
0.12048 | Ceccagnoli M, 2012, MIS QUART, V36, P263 | 0.152331 | Kapoor R, 2013, ADV STRATEG MANAGE, V30, P3 |
0.294151 | Tiwana A, 2010, INFORM SYST RES, V21, P675 | 0.131203 | Zahra SA, 2012, BUS HORIZONS, V55, P219 |
0.040337 | Ghazawneh A, 2013, INFORM SYST J, V23, P173 | 0.260469 | Nambisan S, 2013, ENTREP THEORY PRACT, V37, P1071 |
0.028818 | Chesbrough HW, 2007, CALIF MANAGE REV, V50, P57 | 0.131899 | Selander L, 2013, J INF TECHNOL, V28, P183 |
0.573709 | Adner R, 2006, HARVARD BUS REV, V84, P98 | 0.131837 | Thomas LDW, 2014, ACAD MANAGE PERSPECT, V28, P198 |
0.065454 | Teece DJ, 2007, STRATEG MANAGE J, V28, P1319 | 0.14388 | Gawer A, 2014, J PROD INNOVAT MANAG, V31, P417 |
0.06808 | Gawer A, 2008, MIT SLOAN MANAGE REV, V49, P28 | 0.308062 | Makinen SJ, 2014, J PROD INNOVAT MANAG, V31, P451 |
0.081914 | Iyer B, 2008, HARVARD BUS REV, V86, P58 | 0.110669 | Clarysse B, 2014, RES POLICY, V43, P1164 |
0.121507 | Garnsey E, 2008, IND INNOV, V15, P669 | 0.185977 | Gawer A, 2014, RES POLICY, V43, P1239 |
Data sources: Using Pajek tools to sort out data.
states that the future leadership of technology and innovation in the United States will be based on a new system model, the Innovation Ecosystem (PCAST, 2004).
According to the statistics in
In addition, it is worth noting that there is only one developing country China among the top 10 countries. In China, the economic and social development has entered a “new normal” transition period. The state supports the public’s policy initiatives for innovation and entrepreneurship. In recent years, Chinese scholars have paid more attention to the innovation-driven development policy in order to realize the transformation and upgrading of the real economy. The rest are all developed countries, with 841 articles published in European countries (including Britain); besides, the main research institutions are mainly concentrated in the United States (14) and the United Kingdom (2). The University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom ranks first with 59 articles, while the University of Stanford and the University of Michigan in the United States rank second with 44 articles. Therefore, the research on innovation ecosystem has become the most important research area in developed countries.
In order to dig out the main development direction of innovation ecosystem, this paper uses co-citation and word clouding technology to do text mining and topic clustering analysis on the literature of innovation ecosystem. As shown in
From the perspective of text mining in this field, various themes can be divided into different levels. As shown in
are mainly knowledge, industry, technology, innovation, management, network, capabilities and other fields. Secondly, R&D, product, value creation, system evolution, entrepreneurship and competition are also hot research areas.
In order to find a clearer developing path of innovation ecosystem, citation relations are found among scientific literature and the key directions in each research phase,
the highest cited frequency in the field of innovation ecosystem [
Through the combination of local main path and global main path, the whole process of innovation ecosystem development is systematically discovered.
The local main path consists of 18 papers. Adner (2006) recognized that the value of an industry ecosystem as a whole far exceeds the sum of business operations or technical specifications owned by different enterprises individually [
In the context of the business ecosystem development, from a technical point of view, Dedehayir O (2011) measures the length of time that how long an industry has been replaced by other independent secondary industries who can provide similar technology. It is believed that the continuous change of industry is due to the continuous progress of technology, which is the main driving factor of innovation [
form in complementary activities affects the investment in new science and technology [
Based on Kapoor R’s research, Gawer (2014) summarized the recent industry platform literature, divided the platform types into two main categories: internal platform (enterprise-specific platform), external platform and industry platform [
Adomavicius (2008) understands technology evolution by emphasizing the relationship between multiple technology dynamics and high interdependence relationships. By establishing a technology ecosystem, they describe the interaction and evolution of the three role: components, products and applications within an ecosystem [
With the further study of Storbacka K (2016), the main body of the study focused on the value creation and how to build a service innovation ecosystem. From the change of micro-foundation of strategic management, the micro-foundation of service innovation ecosystem is the participation of members [
Combining the above local and global main path analysis, the local and global main paths are identified by three main elements in
The local main path and global path mentioned above describe the whole development process of the innovation ecosystem. However the local main path and the global path are based on the SPC value, they may omit some important literature and cannot completely comb the literature in different research zones. On the basis of the local main path and the global main path, this paper forms a multi-path of the innovation ecosystem, which can show the theme and development of the innovation ecosystem at different stages.
Based on the analysis of local and global principal paths, the study of innovation ecosystem is divided into two parts. Firstly, under the framework of innovation system research, the regional (industry) and national innovation ecosystem form the middle and macro level of innovation ecosystem. Another way is to analyze the contents of related disciplines from the perspective of ecology. To study the interaction among technology, knowledge process and economic society from the perspective of ecology, for example: knowledge ecology, technology ecology, service ecology and so on. Business ecosystem traces upward, while knowledge, technology and service ecology extend downward. The combination of the two
sides fully reflects the formation and development of innovation system from the perspective of ecology which is innovation ecosystem. This paper takes the research on the relationship among enterprises in innovation ecosystem as the medium industry level, and the internal interaction among enterprises as the micro enterprise level. Subsequently, this paper further draws a multi-path map to further demonstrate the development stage of the innovation ecosystem. As shown in
From
sustainability, service ecology, dominant logic, evolution and development. After the technological ecology develops to a certain stage, we have a new understanding of the business ecosystem, and discuss the new development of the business ecosystem under the situation of transnational corporations and the Internet of Things.
Through the analysis of local main path, global main path and multipath, this paper describes the research of innovation ecosystem from complex to simple, and finally classifies the development of innovation ecosystem into six basic elements. In this paper, the literature on innovative ecosystem is structured. From the perspective of process theory, this paper combs and integrates the literature in this field, and finally gets the theoretical framework of innovation ecosystem, as shown in
Topic (volume) | Development trend | Cluster graph |
---|---|---|
Business innovation ecosystem (513) | ||
Technological innovation ecosystem (766) | ||
Service innovation Ecosystem (619) |
Data sources: web of science.
innovation system based on the characteristics of innovation system; the perspective of ecology and the perspective of strategic management. According to the innovation subject of innovation ecosystem, the innovation subject is divided from macro, middle and micro levels. According to the driving factors of different innovation subject, the development of innovation structure and innovation community is also different. The specific content is shown in
Based on the theoretical framework of innovation ecosystem, this paper analyzes the multi-path node literature from the perspective of innovation, driving factors, innovation subject, innovation structure, innovation community and innovation risk. Firstly, from the perspective of innovation, the review of innovation ecosystem based on evolutionary economics mainly explores the evolution and development of technology and organization. The innovative perspective of early research is mainly from the perspective of innovation system and strategic management. After 2015, the research perspective of scholars has changed to the ecological perspective, which means the perspective of ecology to study the interaction among technology, knowledge process and economic society. In terms of driving factors, the driving factors have changed from organizational strategy driver to diversification drivers, such as innovation ability driving, technology development driving, policy driving and so on, finally to value driving in recent years. The main subject of innovation is still concentrated on the industry innovation ecosystem. Some of the research objects in the key literature are targeted at certain industries, such as pharmaceutical industry, payment industry, digital music industry, mobile platform industry and so on. Another is the evaluation of the whole industry. This paper classifies the two types into the industry innovation ecosystem, because it pays more attention to the integration and utilization of resources on the platform among industries. Secondly, the innovation structure evolves from the hub spoke development in the early stage, that is, from the joint development of core enterprises (focus enterprises) to the symbiotic evolutionary innovation structure of enterprises in the later stage. At the same time, innovation community has been taking innovation integration community as the main link of the industrial chain integration. In recent years, scholars have been more in-depth study, focusing on innovation production community and innovation applied community. Think from aspects of the upstream and downstream of innovation ecological ecosystem. Finally, the problem of innovation risk is also an important factor affecting the development of innovation ecosystem. Some of the failure of innovation ecosystem is caused by the trust crisis of members in innovation risk. Therefore, scholars have strengthened the research on this basic factor. As far as the key literature is concerned, the research of scholars in 2013 will be more involved in innovation risk. In the following years, the innovation risk of articles will be more integrated into the articles rather than independently studied.
In this paper, the scientific measurement method is used to systematically sort out the theme development of innovation ecosystem and the following conclusions are drawn. Firstly, based on descriptive statistics, innovative ecosystems, as an emerging field, are developing rapidly and will be further expanded in the foreseeable future. Throughout the process, scholars (Adner R, Kapoor R, Gawer A, Iansiti Marco) have made outstanding contribution to the development of innovative ecosystems, leading the direction of development in this field. Based on the main path approach, this paper finds that as a whole, innovative ecosystems are widely adapted to different disciplines, and they are not mature and are expanding. However, due to the limitation of the method of calculating the path, some important academic opinions published by scholars such as Moore and Levin have been omitted, so the multi-path method is further extended to refine. This paper divides the development of innovation ecosystem into three parts: business ecosystem, technology ecosystem and service ecosystem. Based on the path analysis, this paper constructs the theoretical framework of innovation ecosystem, and finds that the article in the field of innovation ecosystem develops from commercial innovation ecosystem to service innovation ecosystem. From the perspective of early strategic management and innovation system to the perspective of multi-disciplinary ecology, value co-creation has gradually become the main achieve goal to promote the development of innovation ecosystem.
In the future, the research of innovative ecosystem will involve more disciplines and fields. Innovation ecosystem will pay more attention to the value creation of consumers, such as service ecosystem. For example, from a macro perspective, the service ecosystem believes that all economic and social participants are an important part of value creation. At the same time, the collection and effective processing of information data will become an important foundation for building an innovative ecosystem. However, there are still some shortcomings in the research of innovation ecosystem. Most of the nodal literature on the main path is case studies. Case studies can make us understand the application of innovation ecosystem more clearly, but the comparability of case studies is not strong, and the theoretical expansion is insufficient. In the future, the study of innovation ecosystem should be more in-depth, to open the internal black box of the effective construction of innovation ecosystem, and reveal the core of the internal operation and value creation in innovation ecosystem. Finally, through the open-ended analysis of the innovation ecosystem, we provide a set of system mechanism for innovation development. Use this mechanism in the Chinese market environment in order to form an innovation ecosystem with Chinese characteristics, thereby enhancing the core competitiveness and commercial value of enterprises.
The study is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant #71473086, 71233003) and Key Projects of Philosophy and Social Sciences Research, Ministry of education (Grant #12JZD042). The authors are very grateful for the valuable comments and suggestions from the Reviewers and Editors of the journal, which significantly improved the quality and readability of the paper.
The authors declare no conflicts of interest regarding the publication of this paper.
Meng, Y.Y. and Ma, Y.T. (2018) Innovation Ecosystem Analysis 1986-2017: A Citation-Based Literature Survey. American Journal of Industrial and Business Management, 8, 2231-2255. https://doi.org/10.4236/ajibm.2018.811149