مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

The term ‘innovation ecosystems’ has become popular in industry, academia, and government. It is used in corporate, national, or regional contexts, in idiosyncratic ways. It implies a faulty analogy to natural ecosystems, and is therefore a poor basis for the needed multi-disciplinary research and policies addressing emerging concepts of innovation.

Frenkel and Maital (2014) find an early use of “innovation ecosystem” in a New York Times op-ed by William Kennard, a former Chairman of the US Federal Communications Commission. Other earlier comparisons of business environments to ecological systems include Carroll (1988), Hannan and Freeman (1989), Moore (1993), and Schot (1998). (All owe intellectual debt to Nelson and Winter (1982), though the latter’s work on evolution of technology did not imply there is an ecology of innovation.) However, these researchers may not have been aware that other social scientists had already left the questionable ecosystem analogy behind; see especially Haynes (1971).

Jackson (2011) defines an innovation ecosystem as “the complex relationships that are formed between actors or entities whose functional goal is to enable technology development and innovation.” (A supplementary file, giving more background on innovation systems and their relation to technology-based economic development, accompanies this article.) He continues, The actors include the material resources (funds, equipment, facilities, etc.) and the human capital (students, faculty, staff, industry researchers, industry representatives, etc.) that make up the institutional entities participating in the ecosystem (e.g. the universities, colleges of engineering, business schools, business firms, venture capitalists, industry-university research institutes, federal or industrial supported centers of excellence, and state and/or local economic development and business assistance organizations, funding agencies, policy makers, etc.). The innovation ecosystem comprises two distinct, but largely separated economies, the research economy, which is driven by fundamental research, and the commercial economy, which is driven by the marketplace.