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Purpose – The purpose of this essay is to explore further the concept of value cocreation from a service-ecosystems view, by considering the importance of networks and the configuration of relationships and resources in markets.

Methodology/approach – We use a conceptual approach to extend a service-dominant (S-D) logic, ecosystems view of value cocreation by drawing on the literature regarding networks in marketing and related research.

Findings – A service-ecosystems approach to cocreating value-in-context is proposed, which points toward networks as mediating factors in value cocreation because they influence the ability to access, adapt, and integrate resources by establishing exchange relationships and shaping the social contexts through which value is experienced.

Research implications – This research suggests that value cocreation is a complex and multidimensional process that is best studied in the context of dynamic networks or ecosystems of service exchange.

Practical implications – This research suggests that networks mediate value cocreation, and thus, firms should consider the configurations of relationships and resources to develop more compelling value propositions.

Social implications – This research draws on the idea that exchange relationships are embedded within society and suggests that processes of value cocreation not only draw on but also contribute to the social contexts that frame market exchange.

Originality/value of essay – This research extends the value cocreation and S-D logic literature by exploring the role of networks in service ecosystems. In this framework, networks are mediators of value cocreation because they enable access to resources and help to (re)shape social contexts through which value is derived.

This chapter provides a reflective synopsis of six cases focused on making healthcare sustainable. The nature and value of an ecosystem perspective is explored. The intent is to apply and generate organizational knowledge to understand and guide purposeful design and learning.

From five countries where healthcare is organized differently, these cases illuminate particular approaches to develop the capabilities for healthcare to deliver greater value to society. Each case is examined through the lens of an appropriate theoretical perspective. This chapter reports the themes that were common in the six case studies.

New approaches are changing the connections in the healthcare ecosystem, including the flows of: medical knowledge, clinical information, and resources. Common themes include: the importance of networks in the emerging healthcare ecosystem; the role of governance mechanisms and leadership to align the diverse ecosystem components; the engagement of dominant ecosystem actors; the need for adaptive change capabilities, and for multi-stakeholder research collaborations to generate actionable knowledge.

Taking an ecosystem perspective enables healthcare leaders to broaden their conceptualization of the changes that will be required to be sustainable in a changing society.

Almost every man, woman and child is affected by the healthcare system. Increasing the sustainability of healthcare is integral to increasing societal sustainability overall.

Viewing the ecosystem as the appropriate focus of purposeful change departs from a traditional approach that focuses on the effectiveness of each element.

Entrepreneurial ecosystems have quickly become one of the most popular topics in entrepreneurship research. Ecosystems are the characteristics and factors of a place that support high-growth entrepreneurship. This provides the ability for the field to provide important policy insights about how to aid the development of high growth, innovative ventures, as well as generate new insights into the relationship between the entrepreneurship phenomenon and the contexts it takes place within. However, work in the field remains undertheorized, with a little understanding of how the entrepreneur benefits from being in a strong ecosystem. This chapter argues that it is helpful to return to Ed Malecki’s work in a previous volume of this series, which explored the importance of networks. His work has contributed to a very broad stream of work on entrepreneurial environment. Using this as a starting point, this chapter distinguishes between “top-down” approaches to study ecosystems, which focus on the actors and factors that make up an ecosystem, and a “bottom-up” approach, which instead examines the ways in which entrepreneurs use their ecosystem to get the resources, knowledge, and support they need. The chapter concludes by suggesting how a research agenda for a bottom-up study of ecosystems can be informed by Malecki’s work.

This chapter is a brief review of some of the research themes of the past two decades on entrepreneurs, networks, and economic development. It begins with embeddedness and the heterogeneity of networks. Next, the chapter turns to a new concept that has emerged during the past decade: entrepreneurial ecosystems. Then, the author reviews the dynamics involved in entrepreneurship and regional development.

The growing uses of digital technologies have been creating several new business opportunities. Recently, a new concept has emerged in the literature, the “digital entrepreneurship ecosystem” (DEE). However, it has been empirically understudied. Thus, this study aims to analyze the influence of DEE on entrepreneurial activity. The meta-organization theory was used as a perspective of analysis. A quantitative methodology was applied in a sample that includes data from 28 European countries through the generalized method of moments. It was concluded that the DEE pillars, informal and formal institutions, market conditions, physical infrastructure, human capital and talent and networking and support positively influence entrepreneurial activity. It was also found that the variables knowledge, creation and dissemination and finance have a negative impact on entrepreneurial activity. Several theoretical and empirical contributions are also left for the various stakeholders. The present study is original, as no known studies analyze the influence of DEE on entrepreneurial activity in European countries from the perspective of meta-organization theory.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the ‘real’ world and substantially impacted the virtual world and thus the Internet ecosystem. It has caused a significant exogenous shock that offers a wealth of natural experiments and produced new data about broadband, clouds, and the Internet in times of crisis. In this chapter, we characterise and evaluate the evolving impact of the global COVID-19 crisis on traffic patterns and loads and the impact of those on Internet performance from multiple perspectives. While we place a particular focus on deriving insights into how we can better respond to crises and better plan for the post-COVID-19 ‘new normal’, we analyse the impact on and the responses by different actors of the Internet ecosystem across different jurisdictions. With a focus on the USA and Europe, we examine the responses of both public and private actors, with the latter including content and cloud providers, content delivery networks, and Internet service providers (ISPs). This chapter makes two contributions: first, we derive lessons learned for a future post-COVID-19 world to inform non-networking spheres and policy-making; second, the insights gained assist the networking community in better planning for the future.

Although entrepreneurial capacity building is a keenly debated topic in migration and diaspora research, the concept of female entrepreneurial capacity and the framing of highly skilled migrant women has remained underexamined. This chapter, therefore, addresses knowledge gaps related to migrant women entrepreneurs (MWEs) by focusing on the entrepreneurial experiences of highly skilled female migrants from both developed and developing countries. Specifically, we turn the ‘disadvantage’ lens towards migrant women’s inherent entrepreneurial dimension, an issue that deserves greater research attention, linking migrant women and their entrepreneurship to the entrepreneurial host context and business environment. Building on rich qualitative data collected via six semi-structured interviews with MWEs based in Finland, we also make practical suggestions for how MWEs can best engage with their entrepreneurial ecosystem as well as suggestions to policy-makers regarding how to improve gender awareness and migrant inclusivity aspects of entrepreneurial ecosystems.

The diffusion and adoption (D&A) of innovation propels today's technological landscape. Crisis situations, real or perceived, motivate communities of people to take action to adopt and diffuse innovation. The D&A of innovation is an inherently human activity; yet, artificially intelligent techniques can assist humans in six different ways, especially when operating in fifth generation ecosystems that are emergent, complex, and adaptive in nature.

Humans can use artificial intelligence (AI) to match solutions to problems, design for diffusion, identify key roles in social networks, reveal unintended consequences, recommend pathways for scaling that include the effects of policy, and identify trends for fast-follower strategies. The stability of the data that artificially intelligent systems rely upon will challenge performance; nevertheless, the research in this area has positioned several promising techniques where classically narrow AI systems can assist humans. As a result, human and machine interaction can accelerate the D&A of technological innovation to respond to crisis situations.

This chapter explores the concept of an entrepreneurship education ecosystem. The concept of ecosystem comes from the natural sciences, but is increasingly applied to regional development, or clusters, which focus on firm inter-organizational relationships. Building on the idea of the university is a key player in a local entrepreneurship ecosystem, this chapter provides a framework for examining a school’s role in this process. A typology is presented that articulates roles that schools may pursue in developing their own internal entrepreneurship education ecosystem.

This paper explores the emergence and coordination of synchrony in networked groups like those that develop integrated product platforms in collaborative ecosystems. While synchronized actions are an important objective for many groups, interorganizational network theory has yet to explore synchrony in depth perhaps because it does not fit the typical diffusion models this research relies upon. By adding organizationally realistic features – sparse network structure and intentional coordination – to the firefly model from theoretical biology, I take some first steps in understanding synchrony in organizational groups. Like diffusion, synchrony is more effective in denser networks, but unlike diffusion clustering decelerates synchrony’s emergence. Coordination by a few group members accelerates group-wide synchrony, and benefits the coordinating organizations with a higher likelihood that it converges to the coordinating organization’s preferred rhythm. This likelihood of convergence to an organization’s preferred rhythm – what I term synchrony performance – increases in denser networks, but is not dependent on tie strength and clustering.