Practice-based learning approach in innovation ecosystem

Purpose - We aim at investigating knowledge and learning mechanisms in innovation ecosystems as organizations and the surrounding firms' context - including businesses and institutional actors - takes an active role in innovation success. Several studies focus on knowledge as firms' asset and investigate on how knowledge could be transferred, integrated and managed (Blomqvist and Levy, 2006). The practice-based approach gained attention within organizational learning literature (Brown and Duguid 1991, 1999; Gherardi, 2000) to counteract the cognitive-based view of knowledge. We examine how learning perspectives enable collaborative innovation in a multiple context. Methodology - Action research gave us the opportunity to focus on mechanisms at the base of knowledge and learning processes in an emerging innovation ecosystem (Ramos, 2002). This method is suitable when changes are ongoing. The ecosystem we investigated is linked to a project supported by the Italian Ministry of Research, set up as a mix of different actors to support the management of a smart city. We identified the "generating action" approach (Tacchi et al., 2003) as it fits with both new initiatives and relevant topics of our research, namely resources, knowledge and partners to be managed as a whole. Originality - The paper contributes to knowledge and learning literature in innovation ecosystem. It identifies ecosystem as an innovation community of practitioners emerging as a form of integrating and organising activities, competences resources and tools lead by (and towards) common and negotiated goals, supporting one another. Collecting, integrating, and generating knowledge are pivotal practices for innovation dynamics and they allow ecosystem to be established. In contexts related to innovations such an approach is necessary to describe how different sources are combined to support projects and how knowledge can be generated, acting as a mean and as an outcome in innovation ecosystems. Practical implications - The analysis led us to the rise of three different knowledge practices - collecting, integrating, generating - useful to describe the way in which learning takes place in a networking innovation context, shaped by actors with different backgrounds, like universities, organizations, and government. More into detail collection, integration and generation emerged as the ways in which knowledge shapes the collaboration in ecosystems, before being upgraded, shared, and integrated in order to generate new knowledge to reach the fixed aims.