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Abstract (189 Words):
The number of empirical descriptions of coevolution in Strategic Innovation Management has greatly increased in the last decade. However, the majority of these descriptions are more of a co-adaptative than of a co-evolutive nature. As inter-firm coevolutive innovation strategies are the only ones able to trigger business ecosystems emergence, this distinction is of central importance. The recent theoretical redefinition of co-evolution in the context of strategic innovation management shed some light on the different existing types of co-evolutionary mechanisms and their associated triggering factors. To validate empirically the theoretical characterization of these elements, a diachronic case study focusing on one Thai conglomerate encompassing 21 companies has been conducted using a critical realist approach. The case study reveals that if the triggering factors required for co-evolution to emerge have all been implemented transversally in the ecosystem, only 2 of the identified collective innovations are really of coevolutive nature. In both cases, the co-evolutionary mechanisms are mutualistic and symbiotic. Other observed attempts to build a collective value proposition only activated coadaptive mechanisms. This analysis confirmed the validity of the parameters proposed as triggering factors for the proposed co-evolutionary mechanisms to emerge.
Key-Words: Co-evolution; Co-Adaptation; Business Ecosystem; Innovation Management; Strategic Management
Type of paper: Research-in-Progress
Co-evolution in a Thai Business Ecosystem: A Case Study
(3209 Words)
This article is a research in progress which is part of an international research program aiming at theorizing the role co-evolutionary mechanisms (CMs) in Business Ecosystems (BE) emergence and development. A critical realist perspective has been adopted to ensure a constant refinement of the theorization construct through empirical validation. Preliminary results of one of the ongoing diachronic case studies are presented in this article.
Introduction
Since the emergence of organizational ecology (Hannan & Freeman, 1977) and the evolutionary theory of the firm (Nelson & Winter, 1982), adaptation, variation, selection, and retention principles have largely spread in strategic innovation management (SIM) but the seminal importation and use of the coevolution concept in SIM have been proposed later by Moore (1993; 1996).
The growing number of successful ecosytemic strategies in leading knowledge-intensive industries both in Western and Asian countries, has increasingly attracted the attention of academia on that topic in the last decade (Jacobides et al., 2016). However, the focus...