Collaboration and Innovation Dynamics in Software Ecosystems: A Technology Management Research Perspective

In a widely used definition, a software ecosystem (SECO) is a “collection of software projects which are developed and evolve together in the same environment.” The objective of this article is to explore how SECOs foster collaboration among their key players to achieve innovation within individual software projects. Thus, in this article, we merge two prevalent views from past research, namely, the organization and the project-centric views on innovation management into a concept map. We then describe how these views complement each other. The resulting concept map contains new concepts that provide better coverage of how innovation currently takes place within ecosystems and shows how internal and external drivers are key to the innovation in SECOs. With this article, we want to open the floor to further discussion on how internal and external drivers can be effective in propelling innovation of both traditional (closed) and open-source SECOs. We solicit future work to expand on this view and to achieve a more complete understanding of how SECOs are connected to innovation.