Innovation Ecosystems as Communities of Practise: Technologies for Incentivising Collaboration Amongst Competing Actors

Recent conceptual advancements in the corporate social responsibility literature emphasise the necessity to increase collaboration and cooperation between corporations and across sectors of society. Such cooperation is argued to produce innovation that better targets contemporary societal challenges and ensures a positive societal impact from business activities. This implies a need for actors to cocreate solutions beyond their immediate business focus. The resulting cocreation structures are often described as “ecosystems” in the management literature. However, these ecosystems typically require coopetition, i.e., a combination of cooperation and competition associated with elevated risk due to uncertain returns on the made investments. Hence, there is a dire need for incentive mechanisms that overcome these obstacles. This chapter presents a solution based on decentralisation technology (i.e., blockchain) offering a novel mechanism for incentivising coopetition. Our work connects tightly to the literature on ecosystems and communities. Informed by an examination of their similarities and differences, we infer that the requested incentive mechanisms for an ecosystem may be tested on a smaller scale in the community setting. The presented technology offers the ability to create secure digital records of activities beyond what conventional financial accounts can cover. An early pilot in a professional community setting shows promising results for increasing incentives towards meeting predefined collective goals. Based on the results of the pilot, we argue that a similar technology may alleviate key obstacles to increased coopetition in ecosystems. Overall, we posit that new digital technologies enable the development of effective mechanisms for incentivising collaboration amongst competing actors. We also present a tangible solution for overcoming significant practical barriers to advancing coopetition in (business) ecosystems. We argue that effective coopetition enables an accelerated innovation rate to solve the increasingly complex challenges facing societies worldwide.