Collaborative Innovation: A Model for Selecting the Optimal Ecosystem Innovation Strategy

Traditionally, innovation initiatives in software-intensive systems companies are viewed as either internal innovation, such as technology driven innovation based on ideas generated within a company, as collaborative innovation where a number of stakeholders co-create value, or as external innovation in which companies adopt strategies to capture and expand on ideas created by other stakeholders. However, and based on longitudinal case study research in six software-intense companies in the embedded systems domain, we see that most innovation strategies involve a mix of internal, collaborative and external elements. Due to the dichotomy in approaches however, companies often fail to select the optimal innovation strategy for the specific innovation challenge at hand. As a result, innovation initiatives suffer and companies and their ecosystem partners cannot fully capitalize on the value created. In this paper, we present a conceptual framework in which we identify twelve different ecosystem-centric innovation strategies. For each strategy, we identify the internal, the collaborative and the external elements. Also, and based on our empirical findings, we provide guidelines on the optimal selection of strategies.