Navigating Innovation Ecosystems - A Quantitative Inquiry into Openness, Environmental Innovations, and Economic Performance of Innovative Firms

Abstract

This Ph.D. dissertation utilizes an innovation ecosystem framework to examine the linkages among the various elements embedded in such an ecosystem. The main elements addressed are 1) openness for innovation, 2) environmental innovations, and 3) the economic performance of innovative firms. This dissertation also examines additional ecosystem elements, including elements external to the firm (e.g., pressures, institutional barriers, and resources) and elements internal to the firm (e.g., appropriability strategy and socialization mechanisms), as well as how these interact with and influence the three interconnected main elements.

This dissertation adopts a synthesized definition of innovation ecosystems, which, at their core, consist of actors, activities, and artifacts. The dissertation views the firm as the focal actor and depicts the studied elements as artifacts and activities within the ecosystem. It extends and examines the relationship among these elements, both inside and beyond firm boundaries. The purpose is to gain a deeper understanding of the relationships between the focal firm and the artifacts and activities embedded in an innovation ecosystem.

This dissertation’s empirical inquiry explores two contexts: young innovative firms across Europe and innovative firms in Sweden. To do this, it utilizes datasets from large-scale surveys obtained from two sources. The first source is the AEGIS survey, which includes 3476 firms in industries with varying levels of technology, ranging from manufacturing to business service sectors. The second source is the Swedish CIS survey, supplemented with firm registry data, which includes 8211 firms across various sectors of the Swedish economy.

The dissertation advances the literature on innovation ecosystems by demonstrating how ecosystem-embedded artifacts can actively mitigate firm-level shortcomings and enhance a firm’s innovation and economic performance. It underscores that technological development pressures, competitive pressures, and institutional barriers – as ecosystem artifacts – yield significant benefits by positively influencing the openness of European young innovative firms. For Swedish innovative firms, environmental innovations are induced by the firm’s openness strategy, climate-related pressures, and the need to maintain competitiveness, with ecosystem artifacts such as public funding functioning as supportive structures. Furthermore, the appropriability strategy, as a firm-level activity, has been shown to positively influence both openness in European young innovative firms and environmental innovations in Swedish innovative firms. The appropriability strategy strengthens firm openness by mitigating the associated uncertainties arising from the pressures and institutional barriers in the surrounding ecosystem, and it may also substitute for firm openness activities in the firm’s efforts to introduce environmental innovations. Socialization mechanisms does not appear to strengthen the influence of environmental innovations on firm performance, which suggests its role may be contingent on the presence of complementary internal organizational capabilities.

These results have valuable implications for managerial practices in navigating ecosystem complexities and uncertainties. They highlight how firms address pressures and institutional barriers and leverage ecosystem resources while utilizing appropriability strategies and socialization mechanisms. Additionally, policy advice, based on the results, is provided on stimulating collaboration among ecosystem actors to advance the broader societal sustainability goal of introducing various forms of environmental innovations. Future research can expand on this dissertation’s results through longitudinal analyses that investigate the nonlinearity of the identified associations in greater depth or through exploring other contexts and ecosystem elements to enhance the generalizability of these results. Finally, research on innovation ecosystems should further explore how ecosystem elements can be categorized as artifacts or activities because this categorization is relative to the actor that perceives them and thus may take on different meanings.