The Roadmap to Ecosystem Value Creation

Abstrakt

As requirements for sustainability in products are defined by governmental initiatives like the UN SDGs and the danish climate agreement, the accommodation of these are met by adopting a circular business model for organisations working with upcycling. In order to sustainably create value for their customers, organisations need to consider sustainability socially, environmentally and economically. For the organisations in the upcycling food byproducts community value creation for their organisations happen internally, however knowledge is shared and collected through network activities. Network activities are thus a way for these organisations to fill in the gaps when innovating for their customers. As this thesis researches how knowledge creation can be facilitated in collaborations to increase value creation for organisations in the upcycling food byproducts community, the framework for facilitation is the Ecosystem Pie Model created by Talmar et al. (2020). Conducting a multi-case-study approach for this research, a pragmatic stance is taken to illuminate the underdeveloped field of scaling up organisations in a circular economy. Initially a general understanding of the mechanisms of knowledge creation in the upcycling food byproducts community is established. This was done to be able to consider what effect a facilitated structure of the Ecosystem Pie Model has on value creation when collaborating towards materializing a shared goal or value proposition. Evaluating this facilitation, five overarching parameters were found to have influence on value creation when establishing an innovation ecosystem; ecosystem strategy, facilitator, customer centrism, knowledge diversity and knowledge conversion. Although these parameters were found to have influence on value creation in innovation ecosystems, underlying mechanisms constructed general elements that must be considered chronologically in order to access the value of an innovation ecosystem. These elements are; circular business model, alignment of community purpose, the ecosystem value proposition, structure and risk. In order to unlock the value creation an ecosystem offers, the Ecosystem Pie Model is a tool for facilitating the process of fulfilling the elements that generate the parameters which contribute to value creation in an innovation ecosystem.