ORCHESTRATION IN INNOVATION ECOSYSTEMS PRE-INITIATION STAGE

Abstract

The orchestrator plays a vital role during the design, mapping, and analysis of the ecosystems’ pre-initiation stages, which will be important in shaping the ecosystem guidelines later. However, there is a lack of knowledge on how these firms plan entry strategies before innovation ecosystem (IE) building. So, this study aims to investigate which orchestration practices support orchestrators in the design of ecosystems. This work transposes innovation network practices to a more complex ecosystem context. We summarised these practices into four orchestration mechanisms. We draw on orchestrating innovation networks’ theoretical perspective and depict the orchestration mechanism into practices associated with understanding how orchestrators design IE in its very early stages of formation. This study contributes to the literature on uncertainty management at the IE level by showing practices for uncertainty management as one important driver for unlocking ecosystem emergence. Second, this study advances the configurational view of IE by depicting an underlying set of practices performed by IE orchestrators and members to foresee and design the IE before its emergence, addressing the dynamics of nascent ecosystem operations. Third, this study contributes to the shaping literature by showing ways to imagine future possibilities and acting proactively to realise those possibilities inside this actionable new structure of economic relationships that requires specific management to increase the probability of success for value proposition’s (VP’s) creation and delivery to the market.