Identifying and framing potential stakeholders in complex innovation ecosystems

Analysing the types and connections to stakeholders may be daunting for engineering students. Creating stakeholder maps can be scaffolded through prompting for different stakeholder roles, which students may use as a starting point. Drawing from 31 student stakeholder analyses, this case study explores students’ ability to identify different types of stakeholders and the range of roles they could play, when provided with a set of stakeholder roles as a point of departure. Students were able to identify a diverse range of stakeholders as well as the multiplicity of stakeholder roles. The role prompting resulted in 36 unique stakeholders and 63 stakeholders identified by multiple students, particularly in customer, supplier, and possible collaborator roles. As such, combining individual, scaffolded mappings can help to capture innovation ecosystems more systematically and illuminate more diverse collaboration opportunities in development projects.