Exploring innovation contexts: system, network and ecosystem innovation

This paper aims to depict the theoretical foundations at the basis of multi-actors innovation. The growing interest in the topic has led to the definition of different innovation labels, namely 'innovation system,' 'innovation network' and 'innovation ecosystem.' In order to pinpoint common and different elements in the three literature contexts and to investigate the academic debate, we performed a bibliometric analysis to observe the wide range of literature on the themes. In detail, we investigated the keywords provided by authors through a double-step co-word even on the last 5 years' contributions. The analysis led us to observe the relevance of management and technological features as tools to get the best from open contexts, especially as concerns knowledge, while strategy appeared less significant, especially when moving from system to network to ecosystem literature.