Who takes the lead? Societal value creation in innovation ecosystems without focal firms

This research aims to explore how innovation ecosystems without a focal firm can create value at the societal level. Participatory action research was conducted from September 2019 to January 2022 to reveal the longitudinal impact. The study involved nine enterprises with 15 managers operating in the offshore wind energy innovation ecosystem in a port at the North Sea. The research findings empirically highlight that value creation can be facilitated by organizing collaborative innovation leadership at the ecosystem level. The participating enterprises engaged with complementors and competitors to organize collaborative co-creation to enable innovation without a focal firm. The complex nature of innovation ecosystems involving multiple layers demonstrates the need for integrating multilayered literature regarding innovation leadership in ecosystems, Business Model Innovation and Knowledge-Concept-Proposal design-based processes grounded in heterogeneous knowledge domains, organizational behaviors, and preferred individual behaviors for explorative and exploitative processes to enable innovation for value creation. The findings contribute to the understanding of organizing innovation leadership in ecosystems to shift from feedback-based learning to collaborative integrated co-creation for all participants to take the lead on value creation in society.