Information
| EngD trainee | Pegah Kheiri |
| Project | Sustainable business model for facilitating public value creation of Living Lab Innovation Ecosystems |
| University supervisor | Prof.dr.ir. Isabelle Reymen (IE&IS) |
| Company advisor | dr. ir. Elke P.H. den Ouden, dr. Myriam M.A.H. Cloodt |
| Name of company | OpZuid Program |
| Period of project | June 2019 鈥� May 2021 |
Public Summary
The public sector is increasingly relying on living lab innovation ecosystems to facilitate processes of public value creation. Therefore, sustainability and viability of public living lab innovation ecosystems is growing in importance, and, turning into the focus of increased efforts, in both theory and practice.
Based on an extensive literature review on living labs combined with business models from an innovation ecosystem perspective, we identified two gaps that contribute to the lack of sustainability and viability in living lab innovation ecosystems:
- There appears to be no sustainable business model that considers ecosystem as the unit of analysis.
- There is limited knowledge about how to align and coordinate the efforts of multiple heterogeneous stakeholders involved in living lab innovation ecosystems.
To address these two gaps, we employed the Zott & Amit framework for business model design and extended it from firm-level to ecosystem-level.
As a result, we were able to design an ecosystem-centric sustainable business model for innovation ecosystem of public living labs. Our results contribute to living lab, ecosystem, and innovation management literature by introducing high potential investment solutions through meaningful processes as collaborative value propositions of public living lab innovation ecosystems.
As such, changing the perspective from firm-level to ecosystem-level resulted in exploring business partners as a new actor-group which is a component missing in existing firm-centered living lab anatomies. By exploring the potential of this actor-group, it is clear that business partners have a key role in scalability of living lab innovation ecosystems. We also introduce solid practices and explain how these practices and their generated mechanisms can facilitate the process of value cocreation, and therefore, support orchestrating the efforts of the heterogeneous stakeholders in living lab innovation ecosystems. Furthermore, we contribute to living lab, business model and innovation management literature by introducing lock-in as dominant source of value creation in ecosystem-centric sustainable business models. In addition to our contributions to the body of literature, we offer a practical application in the form of an interactive prototype (of a digital platform) to support implementation of the proposed sustainable business model.
Funded by: OPZuid
