Digging deep into the enterprise innovation ecosystem: How do enterprises build and coordinate innovation ecosystem at firm level

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to explore how Chinese enterprises overcome their lack of resource and capabilities and eventually fulfill global resource accumulation, fast innovative commercialization and significant technological breakthrough by establishing and coordinating innovation ecosystem at firm level.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper first reviewed the literature on the structure and coordinating mechanism of enterprise innovation ecosystem and identified two important gaps on the characteristics of ecosystem actors and the logic of innovative coordination. Then, the paper adopted grounded analysis about the construction and evolution of Haier’s innovation ecosystem based on longitudinal case data. On the basis of the case study, the construct of firm-level innovation ecosystem and new logic of coordination are formed.

Findings

This paper found the emerging phenomenon of sub-organizational ecosystem actors and depicted that the establishing process of firm-level innovation ecosystem went through three majors stages, and the corresponding coordinating logic changed from proactive intervention to reactive self-evolution.

Originality/value

This paper tried to make contributions to the studies of structure and coordinating mechanism of enterprise innovation ecosystem, and proposed the enterprise itself could build firm-level ecosystem within its organizational boundary and interact with external ecosystem. The findings enlightened the nested structure of ecosystem, opened the black box of organizational boundary and broke the limitation that existing researches only analyse innovation ecosystem at system level and regard firms as basic analytical unit. Besides, this paper proposed that the coordination of innovation ecosystem can be passively fulfilled by network effect and ecological evolution, where previous studies mainly focused on proactive institutional intervention and resource investment. This point could provide Chinese enterprises with good references.

Citation

Sun, C. and Wei, J. (2019), "Digging deep into the enterprise innovation ecosystem: How do enterprises build and coordinate innovation ecosystem at firm level", Chinese Management Studies, Vol. 13 No. 4, pp. 820-839. https://doi.org/10.1108/CMS-05-2018-0505