Communication practices in innovation ecosystems – Evidences from functional food industry

Purpose – This work aims at depicting the role of communication practices adopted by firms in taking into account the ecosystem (Iansiti and Levien, 2004). The literature on both ecosystem and practices is flourishing in recent years and a combination among these two topics can be useful to understand through an empirical context the ways in which firms address their approach in different ways and towards several actors. The focus on communication depends on its relation to the ‘micro-macro’ relationships (Schatzki et al., 2001) and it can lead to give evidence to the actors surrounding a firm in an innovation ecosystem context. Design/methodology/approach – We propose a qualitative research design as the most appropriate when dealing with new phenomenon. We adopt a content-analysis approach based on the study of different sources (Bazeley and Jackson, 2013), to give evidence to the actors highlighted by firms and to understand which are the ties emerging among the elements of communication practices (quantitative cluster analysis), with a specific focus on consumers (proximity query). Functional food industry is suitable as in line with the innovation ecosystem literature; the firms considered in this investigation have been selected through Euromonitor Passport platform in the European leading market, namely United Kingdom. Originality/value – This investigation tries to shed some more light on the emerging issue of ecosystem in order to understand how firms are perceiving the context around them and how they interact with actors around them when communicating. By considering firms’ approaches in the way described above, the results can be more reliable, as the analysis is based on what firms do in an innovation-based ecosystem instead of what they perceive in such a context. Practical implications – The first insights from the research approach underline the key role played by communication practices in depicting the ecosystem emerging around innovative firms (Kowalkowski et al., 2012). Scholars can benefit from this approach to deepen the topic of emerging ecosystem and to define practices useful to improve the knowledge about how ecosystems arise (Du Plessis, 2007); while firms can assess the way they approach to their surrounding context if they compare the evidences with their perceptions. Customers play a relevant role in the generation of knowledge and the creation of collaboration practices within innovation ecosystems.