Re‐storying the Business, Innovation and Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Concepts: The Model‐Narrative Review Method

• Author: Gregory O'Shea,Seppo Luoto,Henri Hakala,Steffen Farny
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ijmr.12212
• Published date: 01 January 2020
• Date: 01 January 2020

International Journal of Management Reviews, Vol. 22, 10–32 (2020)

DOI: 10.1111/ijmr.12212

Re-storying the Business, Innovation and

Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Concepts:

The Model-Narrative Review Method

Henri Hakala, Gregory O’Shea, Steffen Farny1and Seppo Luoto2

School of Business and Management, LUT University,Lappeenranta, Finland, 1School of Business, Aalto University,

Helsinki, Finland, and 2Independent researcher

Corresponding author email: henri.hakala@lut.fi

Wepropose a novel literature reviewmethod in order to systematically trace and reveal

the dominant narratives of a body of literature:the model-narrative review method. We

apply this method to an ever-growing literature on ecosystems in business studies, as it

resembles a rich knowledgebase with somewhat competing, overarching stories, replete

with emplotted characters, systematic puzzles and embellished scientific drama. Toin-

terpret these unfolding storylines, we both separatelyengage with and connect seminal

workon business, entrepreneurial and innovationecosystems. Through thematic reading

we map the key themes and scientific puzzles in each ecosystem type. Throughenstoried

reading we identify howauthors construct the plot, narrative setting, emplotted charac-

ters, narrative voicesand moral lessons around ecosystems. Through rhetorical reading

we explicate the rhetorical devices and strategies that claim the relevance of their work.

Our findings expose a number of hidden meanings and underlyingassumptions, adding

transparency to ecosystem rhetorics and enhancing conceptual clarity.Altogether, this

method offers a systematic construction of model-narratives to synthesize and critically

reflect upon similarities and differences between related concepts and opens up space

for alternative research questions.

Introduction

Many management scholars and practitioners are in-

spired by the ecosystem concept and praise it because

the ‘ecosystem opens up a new way of looking at

the structure, interaction and exchanges among or-

ganizations’ (Anggraeni et al. 2007, p. 10), reflected

in a stark increase in numbers of original publica-

tions as well as valuable literature reviewson ecosys-

tems in a business context (e.g. Aarikka-Stenroos

and Ritala 2017; Alvedalen and Boschma 2017;

Dedehayir et al. 2018; Grac¸a and Camarinha-Matos

2017; Oh et al. 2016; Ritala and Almpanopoulou

2017). In order to access and conceptually clarify the

sets of actors, institutions, social structures and cul-

tural values that produce economic activity (Thomas

and Autio 2012; Tsujimoto et al. 2015), some au-

thors have flexibly adopted the business, innova-

tion and, most recently, entrepreneurial ecosystem

metaphor (e.g. Adner 2006, 2017; Adner and Kapoor

2010). While essential for the creation of social re-

alities and to help make sense of our experiences

(Musolff 2012), metaphors can also be the root modes

of thinking through which scholars conceptualize and

tell stories of a phenomenon (Haslam et al. 2017). As

a result, an unreflective application of the ecosys-

tem metaphor increases the risk of being vague and

fuzzy, undermining the credibility and explanatory

power of the ecosystem concept (Kuckertz 2019;

Thomas et al. 2018). To shed light on the domi-

nant application of the ecosystem term, we raise the

questions: How do scholars construct business, en-

trepreneurial and innovation ecosystem stories? and

What are the dominant, recurring narrative elements

in seminal articles on ecosystems in the business

literature?

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Re-storying the Business, Innovation and Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Concepts 11

Instead of following a conventional content-

analytical approach to literature reviews that aims to

identify research gaps, we approach the ecosystem

literature by using a novel narrative review method

with an emphasis on influential work. Broadly qual-

ifying as a meta-narrative literature review (Green-

halgh et al. 2005; Jones and Gatrell 2014), this review

approach allows us to formulate model-narratives,

and thereby critically reflect upon the ecosystem

metaphor. By model-narratives, we mean meta-level

narratives that are ideal-type syntheses of the story-

lines in a literature stream (Greenhalgh et al. 2005;

Weber1949). While all literature review papers are es-

sentially narratives that ‘re-story’ the state of current

research, we propose a differentmeaning to ‘nar rative

review’ (cf. Jones and Gatrell 2014). To us, narrative

review is an analysis that explicitly adopts methods

and techniques from the tradition of qualitative narra-

tive research, rather than merely narrating an author’s

opinions on the current state of research. Hence, our

paper reviews the extant literature by examining the

overarching ‘perfect little stories’ (Curtis 1994) con-

tained within, which often followthe structure of fairy

tales in providing lessons for their readers.

In our endeavour, we start with the general idea

that human beings have an innate need to tell and

make sense of stories (Bruner 1990), and that stories

have the ability to transport audiences and make com-

plex evidence plausible. Hence, we arguethat model-

narrative analysis, that is, examining these stories of

ecosystems as the unit of analysis, is an appropriate

method for understanding the way researchers con-

vey meaning for ecosystem concepts. In our analyti-

cal review we broadlyfollow Alvesson and Sandberg

(2011) to challenge inherent assumptions within three

conceptually distinct archetypes of business ecosys-

tem (e.g. Adner 2017; Moore 1993; Zahra and Nam-

bisan 2012), innovation ecosystem (e.g. Adner 2006;

Iansiti and Levien 2004; Ritala and Almpanopoulou

2017) and entrepreneurial/entrepreneurship ecosys-

tem (e.g. Cohen 2006; Isenberg 2010; Neck et al.

2004) to reveal the dominant narrative elements un-

derlying the archetypes and present the re-storied

model-narratives. Our choice fell on the business, en-

trepreneurial and innovation ecosystem concepts as

these three have developed in parallel, whereby con-

ceptual confusion has arisen (Tsujimoto et al. 2015)

due to ‘overlapping statements describing the meta-

organizations between economic actors’ (Valkokari

2015, p. 18). Moreover, as the academic discourse on

ecosystems in the business literature evolves rapidly,

with publication numbers having doubled in the past

three years (2015–2018),1we consider the timing to

be right for this reflective analysis.

In sum, this study generates at least three contri-

butions. First, by providing an initial meta-narrative

review of the ecosystem literature, wefind suppor tive

evidence of a metaphorical use of the term (Kuckertz

2019) and reveal the underlying assumptions in

ecosystem writing, as well as help clarify the

concept. Second, by constructing model-narratives,

we sharpen our understanding of ecosystems as

different types of interactions, relationships and

collaborative practices, and as a result identify new

research opportunities. Third and most importantly,

we outline and apply the methodological concept of

the model-narrative review method,which comprises

nine conceptual elements of narratives that are

revealed through thematic, enstoried and rhetorical

reading and serve as the foundation to construct

model-narratives. As such, we respondto both the call

for experimenting ‘with a wider range of approaches

to reviews of literature’ (Jones and Gatrell 2014, p.

260) as well as to provide detailed methodological

advice on how to conduct the analysis part of a struc-

tured literature review (Denyer and Tranfield 2009).

The paper concludes with a number of constructive

observations and alternative orientations for future

research in ecosystem-related studies and ideas to

further develop this review method.

The model-narrative review method

We build our literature review on the methodologi-

cal concept of the model-narrative, defined as a re-

constructed, overarching narrative based on multi-

method readings of scientific articles in a given field

(Frost 2009; Greenhalgh et al. 2005; Todd et al.

2004). The model-narratives in this study are a re-

construction – or a ‘re-storying’ – of scientific arti-

cles through three lenses, or different types of reading:

(1) a thematic reading, (2) an enstoried reading and

(3) a rhetorical reading. This multi-lensed reading is

also grounded in the idea that, within narrative re-

search, different traditions are not exclusive but com-

plementary, and together can provide a comprehen-

sive base for narrative analysis (Czarniawska 2011;

1Based on our searches in EBSCO Business Source Premier;

when we started to develop this paper in September 2015,

this produced 622 hits, as opposed to the same search string

applied in September 2018, which produced 1180 hits.

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