Business, Innovation, and Knowledge Ecosystems: How They Differ and How to Survive and Thrive within Them

In management studies, the ecosystem metaphor is often utilized without clear definition and, thereby, several partially overlapping concepts such as industrial, business, service, innovation, and knowledge ecosystems have been introduced. The purpose of this conceptual article is to go beyond the confusion to define what is meant by different concepts regarding an ecosystem and especially describe the relationships between the three different ecosystem types: business, innovation, and knowledge ecosystems. The article contributes to the literature by describing how the ecosystem types differ in terms of their outcomes, interactions, logic of action, and actor roles. The results show that the three ecosystem types are interconnected from the viewpoint of the ecosystem actor. For practitioners, the article sheds more light on how the rules of the game (i.e., the logic of action) differ in the different types of ecosystems and demonstrates that different models are needed in order to operate in different ecosystems.