In defense of ‘eco’ in innovation ecosystem

Innovation ecosystem is an increasingly popular but all too often ambiguously utilized concept across academia, policy and business. In their recent well-argued critique of the concept, Oh et al. (2016) called it a “flawed analogy” that is potentially dangerous for its lack of rigor. In this letter, we reflect on this critique and examine pathways to resolve some of the issues pointed out. We suggest that, at its best, the ecosystem analogy combines salient features from natural ecology to inform the design of system-level innovation management activities. This requires a great deal of conceptual and empirical rigor, and we outline a number of ideas for future research in this regard.