Collaborative practices in innovation ecosystem

In management literature “ecosystem” idea is becoming more and more relevant and it appears as a useful way to describe the set in which organizations operate. This is even more common when referring to innovation, in order to describe contributions arising outside from organization boundaries. Our research interests start from innovation ecosystem and are even framed in the domain of practice-based studies, leading to the overlapping of these two streams of research and to the chance to define the collaborative practices to convey innovation in ecosystems. We investigated this approach through a case study based on an innovation context composed by a high number of actors linked to cultural heritage issues, known as DATaBenC. The results of our analysis give us the chance to define this context as set by the proposers and tagged as an innovation ecosystem after defining its identity. Then each actor defines its own identities in the ecosystem and finally the actions are described as a way to operationalize the objectives. By summing up the three practices shed some more light on how innovation takes place, with a detailed description on how actors collaborate to reach common aims driven by innovation.