Читать книгу Innovation Economics, Engineering and Management Handbook 1 - Группа авторов - Страница 47

While the objective of economic theory is to explain the mechanisms of wealth creation, economists have only very recently raised the question of the location of companies and its impact on their development and vice versa. Moreover, although the entrepreneur was identified very early on as a major economic actor, the modalities of their capacity to innovate as an actor are still debated (Boutillier and Tiran 2016; Boutillier and Uzunidis 2016).

Since the beginning of the 20th century, many theories have been developed to formulate explanations to understand the economic dynamics of territories and the role of entrepreneurs. The business ecosystem (BE) (Moore 1993, 1996) is one of the most recent concepts in this field, broadly defined as a set of interactions between firms belonging to different fields of activity sharing a common strategic vision around a pivotal firm that imposes its technology. Moore gives the latter an important power to organize markets and industries. The ecosystem provides a relevant reading grid for understanding the strategies of firms in a given context, which is not reduced to territorial parameters alone, but includes a wide variety of stakeholders, who, in different ways, maintain exchange relationships, in a process of co-evolution.

The use of the ecosystem in the human and social sciences has grown considerably since the 1990s. It is easily used to explain many complex phenomena: entrepreneurship, innovation, business relations, etc. (Scaringella and Radziwon 2018). The BE and the entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE) have attributes in common, including the existence of synergistic relationships between various stakeholders. The BE and EE do not offer the same reading grid (Stam 2015; Brown and Mason 2017). The EE includes a territorial dimension that is not favored in the BE, as well as a public policy and entrepreneurship support dimension (Boutillier et al. 2016). However, although this borrowing from biology is widely criticized (Frery et al. 2012), the ecosystem remains no less relevant in explaining economic dynamics, primarily entrepreneurial ones concerning innovation in the broad sense of the term (product, process, organization), which should prompt us to take this metaphor seriously (Kuckertz 2019). This reference to biology is indeed rich in lessons (selection, adaptation, competition, cooperation).