Exploring Innovation Ecosystems as Networks: Four European Cases HICSS 2016, January 5-8, 2016, Kauai, Hawaii Jukka Huhtamäki, Neil Rubens

1. Exploring Innovation Ecosystems
as Networks: Four European Cases
Jukka Huhtamäki and Neil Rubens
HICSS 2016, Kauai

2.  Innovation often takes place in the context of innovation
ecosystems (Adner and Kapoor 2010, Russell et al. 2011, Autio and
Thomas, 2013, Valkokari 2015)
 New data, tools, and questions are available for insights on latent
structures within innovation ecosystems (Basole et al. 2012, Still et al.
2012)
 Network analysis allows analyzing the structure and structural
dynamics of ecosystems of business and innovation (Russell et al.
2011, Basole et al. 2012)
 In this study, we present a novel approach for measuring
innovation ecosystems with socially constructed data and network
analysis
 …and contrast the results to a more traditional innovation
indicator, Innovation Union Scoreboard to investigate their
compatibility
Introduction

3. Quantitative metrics

4. La
Modest Innovator - Latvia
Moderate Innovator - Hungary
Innovation Follower - Estonia
Innovation Leader- Finland

5.  Network analysis of socially constructed data yields into results
that are comparable to traditional innovation indicators
 Importantly, the approach allows completely new insights into
the system-level structure of the innovation ecosystem
 In order to fully utilize the new actor-level metrics in
understanding innovation, we need equally specific output
metrics for innovation performance
 The new views allow and indeed insist new ways to conduct
decision-making in the context of innovation ecosystems
 Boundary specification has to be reconsidered – here we are
following national boundaries even though innovation does not
respect them!
Conclusions

6.  Developing means and methods to move beyond the
(sometimes) superficial statistical analyses and (often)
case-specific qualitative analyses
 …and to support interdisciplinary investigation of
innovation ecosystems that seek to discover mechanisms
and structures latent in innovation ecosystems, cf. critical
realism in analytics (Bygstad and Munkvold 2011)
 Imperatively, to enable true discourse between academic
research, decision-making and policy-making for
innovation (and business) ecosystems (cross-sector, cross-
border, cross-domain)
Future work

7.  Jukka is @jnkka
@TampereUnitech
 Neil is @activeintel
 We are part of @ien_stanford
 This research was partly
sponsored by Tekes: Finnish
Funding Agency for Innovation
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