Innovation Ecosystems as Communities of Practise: Technologies for Incentivising Collaboration Amongst Competing Actors

Joel Wolff (), Esko Hakanen () and Jarno Marttila ()
Additional contact information
Joel Wolff: Aalto University
Esko Hakanen: Aalto University
Jarno Marttila: Aalto University

A chapter in Building Global Societies Towards an ESG World, 2024, pp 3-15 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Recent conceptual advancements in the corporate social responsibility literature emphasise the necessity to increase collaboration and cooperation between corporations and across sectors of society. Such cooperation is argued to produce innovation that better targets contemporary societal challenges and ensures a positive societal impact from business activities. This implies a need for actors to cocreate solutions beyond their immediate business focus. The resulting cocreation structures are often described as “ecosystems” in the management literature. However, these ecosystems typically require coopetition, i.e., a combination of cooperation and competition associated with elevated risk due to uncertain returns on the made investments. Hence, there is a dire need for incentive mechanisms that overcome these obstacles. This chapter presents a solution based on decentralisation technology (i.e., blockchain) offering a novel mechanism for incentivising coopetition. Our work connects tightly to the literature on ecosystems and communities. Informed by an examination of their similarities and differences, we infer that the requested incentive mechanisms for an ecosystem may be tested on a smaller scale in the community setting. The presented technology offers the ability to create secure digital records of activities beyond what conventional financial accounts can cover. An early pilot in a professional community setting shows promising results for increasing incentives towards meeting predefined collective goals. Based on the results of the pilot, we argue that a similar technology may alleviate key obstacles to increased coopetition in ecosystems. Overall, we posit that new digital technologies enable the development of effective mechanisms for incentivising collaboration amongst competing actors. We also present a tangible solution for overcoming significant practical barriers to advancing coopetition in (business) ecosystems. We argue that effective coopetition enables an accelerated innovation rate to solve the increasingly complex challenges facing societies worldwide.

Keywords: Innovation ecosystem; Community of practice; Coopetition; Incentive mechanism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:csrchp:978-3-031-56619-6_1

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783031566196

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-56619-6_1

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in CSR, Sustainability, Ethics & Governance from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().