The city as an experimental environment: the identification, selection and activation of distributed knowledge in regional innovation ecosystems

During the past decade, Open Innovation (OI) literature has extended its scope from an economical context to the context of societal value creation. This also entailed the notion of (local) distributed knowledge as a driver for innovation, and the importance of multi-stakeholder collaborations in NPD-processes to develop new urban ICT systems for complex urban issues. Hence, several studies have discussed stakeholder ecosystem architectures for such collaborations. However, little is known on how to identify and select stakeholders for collaborative environments embedded in the urban context. Based upon the development and implementation of an open-ended collaboration ecosystem for urban innovation, this paper studies the contextualized interactions between knowledge actors in the ecosystem and processes of attraction, identification, selection and activation. These insights converge in the development of a ‘stakeholder acupuncture framework’, which structures mechanisms and practises within dynamic collaboration ecosystems and defines key boundary conditions for such open-ended ecosystems.