Multiple Context of Innovation: Insights from Literature

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to investigate the most relevant conceptualizations of innovation taken into account by scholars, and the linkages among them. Over time, the increasing interest in this area has involved a great variety of actors and contexts in establishing the definition of different innovation labels; we chose to focus the analysis on “system innovation”, “network innovation” and “ecosystem innovation”. In order to observe the most relevant elements of each research stream and common aspects, a two-step analysis of literature contributions has been performed through a bibliometric analysis comparing the evidence emerging from one survey of keywords provided by authors and a second of keywords provided by editors. Through this kind of investigation the editors’ keywords emerged as more objective, but nevertheless, by considering some of the different evidences obtained from the keywords provided by authors, the two-step analysis is useful to provide more complete results.