Beyond Silicon Valley: How Tapping Into Innovation Ecosystems Drives Organizational Competitive Advantage

A new book by MIT Sloan faculty highlights the crucial role of geographic innovation hubs and offers a strategic roadmap for engagement.

/EIN News/ -- Cambridge, MA, April 29, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Leaders in large organizations face continuous pressure to innovate, but few possess all the internal resources needed to keep up with rapid advances in innovation, science, and technology. But when looking beyond their own organizations, most face a bewildering landscape of external resources. 

In their new book, Accelerating Innovation: Competitive Advantage through Ecosystem Engagement, Senior Lecturer Phil Budden and Associate Dean of Innovation and Professor of Entrepreneurship Fiona Murray offer leaders, whether from private, public, or nonprofit sectors, a practical guide to this external landscape and a framework for strategic engagement with specialized global 'innovation ecosystems' — those geographic hubs across the globe where researchers, entrepreneurs and investors congregate. Tapping into these strategically, they stress, allows organizations to find novel ideas, resources, and talent to build a competitive edge.

The Ecosystem Playbook: What, Who, and How

Innovation ecosystems can be found across the globe;for example, Singapore (smart cities), London (fintech), Copenhagen (quantum computing) and Perth (advanced mining sector) among others. Engaging with an innovation ecosystem doesn’t require a corporate relocation or even a significant investment of resources (often, a few employees on the ground are plenty). However, it does require patience, strategy, and a willingness to build from the ground up. 

“It’s not about innovation tourism,” Budden said. “You can’t just buy a few orange chairs, declare yourself an innovation hub, and wait for people to turn up.”

Accelerating Innovation guides leaders through three critical questions to answer before engaging:

What does the organization need from the ecosystem? 

Who are the right stakeholders (entrepreneurs, universities, risk capital providers) to engage? 

How should the organization structure its engagement?

“From our research, many leaders of large organizations often focus on how they're going to engage — through a hackathon, or an acceleration program,” Budden noted. Instead, Budden recommended starting with the first principles to identify what they're looking to get from an ecosystem. “This is likely to lead to better results for the large organization, and is also going to avoid wasting the time of other busy stakeholders in the ecosystem,” he said.

The Long View: Why Ecosystem Engagement Requires Patience

With a solid strategy in place, organizations can start building ecosystem relationships. 

“Senior leaders need to empower their innovation teams by giving them the time to go out into the ecosystem and see how it works. They need to work out what it is that their organization can bring to the ecosystem, not only what it needs from it,” Budden said. “This is really about human relationships, and it takes time to build that trust, 

This long-term perspective often clashes with short-term pressures, Budden said. “The key message for leaders is that this process doesn’t work to the traditional rhythm of quarterly earnings or annual tax filings; the ecosystem is organic. Leaders need to have courage to set this for a few years into the future, because otherwise the markets will drive them to short termism. That’s what drove Kodak into bankruptcy.”

Despite the rise of remote work and increasing geopolitical uncertainty, Budden and Murray asserted that place-based ecosystems remain vital.

“In our research, we think that ‘place’ still matters for innovation ecosystems,” Murray said.  “And in this era of greater geopolitical uncertainty, we think that place matters even more.  Leaders of large organizations need to be especially thoughtful about how they engage ecosystems outside of their bases, because they have no monopoly on innovation.”

Budden believes strategic ecosystem engagement is not an option, but a necessity for organizations that want to remain competitive. 

“Innovation is more than a buzzword,” he said. “It's a real-world phenomenon that is going to separate out the fates of individual careers, of different companies, and the communities and countries in which they operate. So innovation really matters, and it's worth investing time to understand how to navigate through it.”

Accelerating Innovation: Competitive Advantage through Ecosystem Engagement is now available from MIT Press. To learn more about the book’s concepts and approach, watch a recent webinar with Budden and Murray. For leaders who want to train their teams on these concepts, MIT Sloan Executive Education offers an on-demand online sprint course, "Accelerating Innovation through Ecosystems."

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• Accelerating Innovation: Competitive Advantage Through Ecosystem Management

Matthew Aliberti
                    MIT Sloan School of Management
                    7815583436
                    malib@mit.edu