Identifying and framing potential stakeholders in complex innovation ecosystems

While engineering is often characterised as a technical and analytical discipline, it is essential to recognize that engineers do not design products or systems in isolation; they design them to function within societal and environmental systems. However, analysing the types and fields of stakeholders to produce holistic stakeholder maps may be daunting for students. The process may be scaffolded through the inclusion of specific stakeholder roles, which students may use as a starting point. Drawing from 31 students’ 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. Findings highlight that students were able to identify a diverse range of stakeholders as well as the multiplicity of stakeholder roles. Many connections were, however, close to the provided industry context and the students’ backgrounds compared to other potentially relevant contexts. The role prompting did however result in 33 unique stakeholders and 66 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.