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The purpose of this paper is to examine the mediating role of ecologies of innovation in the relationship between positive deviance (PD) and entrepreneurial networking among small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Uganda.

A cross-sectional survey design using quantitative approach was employed in this study. Data were collected with the help of self-administrated questionnaires from 228 SMEs. Systematic sampling technique was used. Multiple regression data were analysed with the help of SPSS software.

The results indicated that ecologies of innovation partially mediate the relationship between PD and entrepreneurial networking. Besides, PD and entrepreneurial networking are significantly related.

The data were cross-sectional in nature, thus limiting monitoring changes in resources accessed from social networks by entrepreneurs over time.

Managers of SMEs and policy makers should pay more attention to the views of employees with divergent views, ecologies of innovation in creating a conducive environment for creativity and innovation among SMEs.

The study of PD, ecologies of innovation and entrepreneurial networking using complexity theory among SMEs in Uganda is a contribution to literature.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the governmental, economic, and technological factors contributing to a country's innovation ecology that have an impact on sustainable economic growth.

This paper investigates governmental, economic, and technological supports that comprise the innovation ecology of 34 nations using ordinary least squares, discriminant analysis, and mediated regression. It is proposed that the strength of a country's innovation ecology is associated with greater sustainable entrepreneurial growth opportunities. Innovation indicators and trend analyses were collected from Eurostat Yearbook 2007, Science and Technology, and Global Financial Data over the 1995‐2005 period.

The results reveal that while the influence of government and the economic environment encourage innovation ecology, having resources at the research and development levels, human capital, and early seed funding were key indicators of innovation. The greater the degree of research and development, the availability of a highly skilled labor force, and the amount of private and public venture capital funding, the more likely it is that a strong national innovation ecology will emerge leading to the creation of new business ideas and growth opportunities.

The results contribute to the understanding of the significant role of innovation investment for new business development and growth.

Social entrepreneurship is primarily concerned with the development of innovative solutions to society's most challenging problems. Since social entrepreneurship flourishes in resource-constrained environments, social innovation may depend on the extent to which social entrepreneurs can combine and apply the resources at hand in creative and useful ways to solve problems – “bricolage.” Moreover, innovating for social impact relies on a set of institutional and structural supports – “innovation ecology,' which can facilitate or impede innovation. Our research empirically examines these variables as drivers of systemic social change through scaling and replication – “catalytic innovation” (i.e., the development of products and services targeted to unserved markets). Results of a survey conducted with 113 social entrepreneurs indicate that, while innovation ecology is associated with the degree of catalytic innovation, it is mediated by the role and degree of bricolage that social entrepreneurs bring to solving problems. These findings reinforce the role of entrepreneurs as the indispensable agents of social change.

Innovation is the process of turning knowledge and ideas into value. An “urban innovation engine” is a system which can trigger, generate, foster and catalyze innovation in the city. This paper describes the concept of the “urban innovation engine”, provides some historical and contemporary examples, and suggests a set of guidelines for turning ordinary urban institutions into innovation engines. The paper has two purposes: to trigger further theoretic and action research and exploration in the domain of urban innovation. In recent years there has been intensive research about the conditions (“ecology”) which enable and catalyze knowledge development and innovation in the business world. A second new focus area in the research of knowledge development is the role of the city as a hub for intensive flows and exchanges of knowledge among its habitants and additional stakeholders. We suggest weaving the learning from the business and urban worlds by attempting to apply the dimensions of innovation ecology models to knowledge cities. More specifically, we look at multiple traditional urban constructs, and show how they might act as significant drivers for creativity and renewal. Typically an urban innovation engine is a complex system that includes people, relationships, values, processes, tools and technological, physical and financial infrastructure. We suggest that what innovation engines really do is to create conversations – which are the foundation of most innovations. We bring some examples and snap‐shots from several urban innovation engines such as the museum, the library, the stock exchange, the café, the brownfield, the grand fair, the outlook tower, and the industrial district. The paper conceptualizes the notion of “urban innovation engines”. Based on this concept, it provides a set of guidelines for creating a knowledge city using innovation engines as its building blocks, and innovation ecology elements as an important part of its operating system.

Most academic work on sustainability has been focused on the organizational level, reflecting the popular “business case for sustainability” idea. However, organizations are certainly not the only locus of entrepreneurial action for sustainability, nor are they the most ideal. This chapter reports on a six-year study of the Sustainability Consortium, a collaboration started in 1999 between large companies that were seeking to lead their industry through innovative initiatives for sustainability. The findings, based on 60 interviews and many other sources of data, identify eight “ecologies of entrepreneurial action,” all of which were critical for driving change. These ecologies are: Individual Aspiration; Network Affiliation; Process Optimization; Entrepreneurial Innovation; Value Chain Collaboration; Industry/Sector Coordination; System-Wide Integration; and Social Transformation. As shown by complexity theory, the interdependent and interconnected nature of these ecologies means that only by expanding beyond organizationally focused endeavors can we help generate the social transformation that will lead to a sustainable world.

To present a generic empowerment ecology framework to guide the operation of Future Centers and to empower Future Center visitors to respond to the challenges facing them and develop and implement innovative solutions.

An in‐depth case study was conducted in Be'er Sheva PISGA Future Center in the educational sector in Israel. Visits to a further 20 Future Centers around the world and a literature review helped to generalize the key findings and develop and validate the framework further.

Although empowerment is not always explicitly discussed in Future Centers, it is an important underlying philosophy. The framework developed in this research helps to ensure empowerment issues are systematically addressed and contains four perspectives: operating principles; resources; supporters and processes. These combine to form the empowerment ecology.

The empowerment ecology framework has been developed from observation predominantly in one Future Center. It should now be more fully tested and validated in other Future Centers.

This paper provides a framework to help Future Center practitioners and other future oriented working environments stakeholders to explicitly address empowerment issues.

This paper provides a detailed description of the operation of a regionally focused Future Center in the educational sector. The paper presents a novel empowerment ecology framework for use in facilitated user‐centered collaborative working environments, such as Future Centers.

The purpose of this chapter is to explore the phenomenon of innovation in a particular setting in Japan, and more specifically to trace a local initiative toward the creation of an “innovation ecosystem” in a large city and its surrounding region in Western Japan, with the aim of fostering entrepreneurship and economic revitalization.

The analysis in this chapter is based on ethnographic fieldwork, including participant-observation in meetings and events held to promote entrepreneurship and collaboration in the region, as well as interviews with city officials, managers, and entrepreneurs related to the activities of the creation of the “innovation ecosystem.”

In the chapter, I show how the emergence of the ecosystem metaphor for business innovation informs practices and imaginaries in which relations, co-creation, and natural growth become central as models of and for innovation processes in a context of crisis, in ways that generate not only innovation but the ecosystem itself.

The chapter provides historical and social context to the metaphor of the innovation ecosystem that is receiving increasing interest globally, and provides insights into how innovation activities and the enacting of the “innovation ecosystem” take place in practice.

This chapter advances our understanding of collaborative innovation processes that span across organizational boundaries by providing an ethnographic account of idea generation dynamics in a member-initiated online songwriting community. Applying a science and technology studies perspective on processes “in the making,” the findings of this chapter reveal the generative entanglements of three processes of content-in-the-making, skill-in-the-making, and community-in-the-making that were triggered and maintained over time by temporary stabilizations of provisional, interim outcomes. These findings also elucidate interferences between these three processes, particularly when an increased focus on songs as products undermines the ongoing collaborative production of ideas. Regular interventions in the community design were necessary to simultaneously stimulate the three processes and counteract interfering tendencies that either prioritized content production, community building, or skill development, respectively. The authors conclude that firms seeking to tap into online communities’ innovative potential need to appreciate community and skill development as creative processes in their own right that have to be fostered and kept in sync with content production.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the development and evolution of industrial innovation ecosystems of Around-Tongji Knowledge Economy Circle from the three levels mentioned above, focusing on knowledge-producing populations, core populations and service-supporting populations, and to further develop this research framework by combining with the latest developments.

Based on the five-helix theory and economic census statistical data, this paper adopts geographic information system technology and examines the characteristics of the industrial innovation ecosystem and the synergistic evolution process in Around-Tongji knowledge economy circle.

The knowledge product populations lead the development of industries in Around-Tongji Knowledge Economy Circle. It contributes political capital output for the government. It innovates community cooperation and governance mode, and it improves the natural ecological environment. In the face of the changes and challenges in the development environment, the future development must be recognised from the height of the iterative development of the interaction mode between university knowledge production and economic and social development.

Based on the five-helix theory and economic census statistical data, this paper examines the characteristics of the industrial innovation ecosystem and the synergistic evolution process in Around-Tongji Knowledge Economy Circle. It further expands the research framework used to develop a synergistic evolution model, which reveals the interactive and synergistic relationship among the populations and the evolution characteristics of the entire industrial innovation ecosystem. This paper also provides useful perspectives for the study of the industrial innovation ecosystem.

The purpose of this article is to describe a future center as an urban innovation engine for the knowledge city, to understand the success factors of a future center and how this success can be replicated systematically in the implementation and development of future centers in the future.

Nine future centers were visited and a longitudinal action research‐based case study was conducted at the regional Be'er Sheva PISGA Future Center in Israel, within the educational domain.

There are 13 conceptual building‐blocks for a future center and the unifying principle is conversations. The PISGA future center put the concept of a future center into action and was guided by six operating principles: values, experiment and learning, organizational structure, partnerships, physical space, and virtual space. They were able to initiate ten new educational projects within the first two years of operation. A conceptual model of a regional future center was developed and tested on the PISGA case, defining the five key ingredients as community conversations, future images, an innovation lab, a knowledge and intelligence center and implementation projects.

After two years of testing the findings, only intermediate results are available. Further research is needed to develop and test the concepts and model further.

This paper provides building‐blocks and a generic model that can be used by the creators of next generation future centers.

This paper provides the first generic building‐blocks and the first generic implementation and operational model for a future center.