Digitalization is a catalyser that drives rapid changes in industries. While bringing huge opportunities for business, digitalization outdated existing capabilities and working methods, thus, it brings threats to companies who cannot timely innovate themselves. In today’s business landscape, no company has sufficient resources to develop digital innovation alone. Companies have to be able to attract, secure and combine a variety of new resources and competencies from other organizations to co-create new services on top of its technology platform. Currently, we see that innovation ecosystems are emerging to answer to this need.
Innovation ecosystems are inherently complex as they consist of multiple actors coming from different cultural, political, economical and knowledge backgrounds. Thus, developing innovation ecosystems can be very challenging. However, we have not been equipped with sufficient theoretical and practical knowledge to understand how a company can form an innovation ecosystem. Therefore, this thesis was set to establish a deeper understanding of the factors and capabilities that support the formation of an innovation ecosystem.
Through an extensive literature review of both fields - ecosystem and dynamic capabilities, this thesis established the first theoretical model that explains the development of an innovation ecosystem. This theoretical model was applied and developed iteratively in an in-depth case study of a European-based Intelligent Mine innovation ecosystem. This thesis was conducted using an exploratoratory, qualitative approach and followed an abductive research design. Data was collected through several open-ended interviews with ecosystem members and analyzed following Gioia methodology.
The results of this thesis shed light on: (1) the key factors that trigger the formation of an innovation ecosystem, (2) the motivations of a hub company for forming an innovation ecosystem, and (3) the sensing and seizing mechanisms that a hub company employed while forming its innovation ecosystem. Moreover, a conceptual model was developed after refining the initial theoretical with new empirical insights. This thesis contributes directly to the development of new theory on ecosystem formation and the new application of dynamic capabilities framework in ecosystem literature. It also provides useful suggestions for companies whose aspiration is to develop innovation ecosystems around their core technologies
