The City as an Experimental Environment: The Identification, Selection, and Activation of Distributed Knowledge in Regional Open Innovation Ecosystems

Over the past decade, open innovation (OI) literature has extended its scope beyond strictly economic contexts to the context of societal value creation. This has given rise to the notion of (local) distributed knowledge as a driver for sustainable innovation and has highlighted the importance of multi-stakeholder collaborations in new product development (NPD) processes to develop new ICT systems for complex urban issues. Several studies have discussed sustainable stakeholder ecosystem architectures for such collaborations. However, little is known about stakeholder identification and selection processes for collaborations in the urban environment. By combining action research with a case study design, this paper studies the nature of contextualized interactions between knowledge actors in the ecosystem and the processes of attraction, identification, selection, and activation of stakeholders in an urban living lab (ULL). These insights converge in the development of a ‘stakeholder acupuncture framework’, which structures mechanisms and practices within dynamic collaboration ecosystems and defines key boundary conditions for such open-ended ecosystems.