Thriving Innovation Ecosystems: Synergy Among Stakeholders, Tools, and People

TL;DR

This paper investigates how stakeholders in innovation ecosystems use digital tools and human networks for decision-making, highlighting the primacy of human input over digital tools and exploring ways to enhance decision processes.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of stakeholder motivations, information needs, and practices, emphasizing the central role of human networks in innovation ecosystems.

Findings

Stakeholders are motivated by social impact.

Digital tools support high-level information gathering.

Human networks provide critical contextual information.

Abstract

An innovation ecosystem is a multi-stakeholder environment, where different stakeholders interact to solve complex socio-technical challenges. We explored how stakeholders use digital tools, human resources, and their combination to gather information and make decisions in innovation ecosystems. To comprehensively understand stakeholders' motivations, information needs and practices, we conducted a three-part interview study across five stakeholder groups (N=13) using an interactive digital dashboard. We found that stakeholders were primarily motivated to participate in innovation ecosystems by the potential social impact of their contributions. We also found that stakeholders used digital tools to seek "high-level" information to scaffold initial decision-making efforts but ultimately relied on contextual information provided by human networks to enact final decisions. Therefore, people, not digital tools, appear to be the key source of information in these ecosystems. Guided by our findings, we explored how technology might nevertheless enhance stakeholders' decision-making efforts and enable robust and equitable innovation ecosystems.