Managing Innovation Ecosystems to Create and Capture Value in ICT Industries

In a new knowledge-intensive economic landscape, firms need to access external knowledge sources due to their inability to generate all necessary knowledge on their own. The interaction with and learning from external knowledge sources implies that firms depend upon decisions and actions made by business partners and external support organizations. This network of linkages can be considered as an ecosystem in which commercial enterprises and non-firm organizations interact with one another and work together to create and capture value. Previous studies have shown that a firm's ability to successfully commercialize a new product depends not only on its own technology strategy but also its capabilities to manage an innovation ecosystem strategy. Dynamic markets, intense competition, and shorter product lifecycles force companies across different industries to create and capture value more rapidly by launching new innovations. Well-defined and executed innovation ecosystem strategies can help companies to develop new markets and business opportunities for the different types of innovations and enable their businesses to grow. This study provides new insight into how an ecosystem strategy can be formed based on the traditional strategy literature and proposes a conceptual framework for senior leaders to form an ecosystem strategy.