Exploring Innovation Ecosystems as Networks: Four European Cases

More often than ever before, innovation takes place in the context of innovation ecosystems. New data, tools, and questions are available for insights on latent structures within innovation ecosystems. Used in concert, socially constructed data and network analysis afford new insights to compare and analyze the structure and dynamics of innovation ecosystems. In this article, we apply a novel approach for exploring innovation ecosystems through networks. Moreover, we investigate whether this new way of measuring innovation produces similar results compared to more traditional indicators, here Innovation Union Scoreboard. We conclude that network analysis of socially constructed data yields into results that are comparable to traditional innovation indicators and, importantly, allows completely new insights into the system-level structure of the innovation ecosystem. The new views allow and indeed call for new ways to conduct decision-making in the context of innovation ecosystems.