The challenges our societies face today call for multi-layered and consistent collaboration across heterogeneous actors from a variety of sectors and disciplines (Paavola & Lahtinen, 2023). Ecosystems – i.e., interdependent sets of organizations that together enable reaching a system-level goal or a value proposition (see e.g., Adner, 2017; Thomas & Ritala, 2022) – present an especially helpful form of organization (Kretschmer et al., 2022) that holds a lot of potential for confronting the rather demanding challenges of our times (Ritala et al., 2023). While initially coined in 1993 by Moore (see Moore, 1993), the ecosystem lens was increasingly adopted especially from the 2010s onwards, initially in the form of “innovation ecosystems” (Adner, 2006; Rohrbeck et al., 2009; Adner & Kapoor, 2010; Ritala et al., 2013), and later in a variety of different conceptualizations. Now, the ecosystem has become a mainstream concept, and it has been adopted by management scholars and practitioners.

Authors: Paavo Ritala, Henri Hakala, Argyro Almpanopoulou, Jessica Fishburn, Christina Häfliger, Nelly Dux

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