Species in the wild: a typology of innovation ecosystems

The purpose of this paper is to offer a comprehensive and useful typology of innovation ecosystems. While recent conceptual efforts have been allocated to delineating innovation ecosystems from other phenomena, much less systematic attention has been given to the diversity found within the innovation ecosystem realm. We run a thematic analysis of systematic literature reviews and collect 34 specific types of innovation ecosystems. We expand this list with criteria-derived complementary types and propose a set of 50 distinct innovation ecosystem varieties. Next, we identify the 14 typology criteria used so far in the literature, thematically analyse them and aggregate them into a set useful for further rigorous scrutiny and for the incremental collection of empirical findings. Innovation ecosystems can thus be categorized into (1) life cycle, (2) structure, (3) innovation focus, (4) scope of activities, and (5) performance.