Beyond Hierarchies: Orchestrating Open Innovation Ecosystems in the Energy Sector

Over the last years, the ecosystem perspective in Innovation research has expanded towards different streams, such as business, innovation, and platform ecosystems, among others. In the Open Innovation field, studies focusing on coupled modes of innovation (i.e., inside-out and outside-in modes) have shown how these modes often lead to the creation of networks and ecosystems. As opposed to market relationships, both networks and ecosystems highlight how organizations manage interdependencies among each other; ecosystems, however, are different in that they emerge from participants’ action in managing nongeneric complementarities in absence of hierarchical control. While the “traditional” Open Innovation modes view transactions as occurring between the inside and the outside of an innovating firm, the adoption of the ecosystem perspective in Open Innovation studies involves the analysis of knowledge flows managed by ecosystem participants who contribute to the process of co-creation of value. In this view, open innovation ecosystems are defined as communities of independent, yet interdependent heterogeneous actors that promote innovation around a focal firm, each with a different role. The study seeks to understand to what extent these actors, along with the focal firm, contribute to the creation of an open innovation ecosystem, and how this process is orchestrated. First, we conceptualize open innovation ecosystems in the broader ecosystem literature in order to differentiate them between other inter-organizational settings. Then, by longitudinally analyzing the case of a leading player in the energy sector based in Italy, we explore how the focal firm creates the conditions for innovation by encouraging other actors outside its organizational boundaries to engage in innovation activities. In doing so, we adopt an abductive approach aimed at a constant “back and forth” from theory and empirical observation. Our study contributes to the Open Innovation field by reporting an exemplary application of an open innovation strategy aimed at creating an ecosystem involving different public and private stakeholders that engage with the focal firm in the orchestration process.