Abstract

The aim of this paper is to employ the innovation ecosystem concept to shed light on how companies manage relationships with multiple external companies to develop new products and supply them to customers, and the kinds of conditions that must be met and issues that must be tackled to that end. In this paper, ecosystems are defined as “the collaborative arrangements through which firms combine their individual offerings into a coherent, customer-facing solution” (Adner 2006). The case of Pioneer Corporation’s development of a new product, “Cyber Navi,” was investigated and analyzed in detail as an example of innovation ecosystem management in Japanese companies.

The results of the analysis showed that if innovation ecosystems are divided into product development and product supply, Pioneer is able to properly and characteristically manage product development, which is close at hand, but with respect to product supply, it faced internal issues and gaps in perceptions with suppliers. Pioneer also took stakes in or forged business partnerships with companies that continued to supply essential and important content after the launch of the product as a form of opportunistic behavior. In addition, three key conditions for management of the innovation ecosystem were presented:

(1) The company that is the leader of the innovation ecosystem is not just a technology integrator. If there are issues with its partners, it is able to manage them jointly with the partners.

(2) The company establishes partnerships with companies that could play a key role with industry partners in the innovation ecosystem.

(3) The company is able to employ and ensure the survival of the ecosystem to make its own existing technologies, services, and infrastructure “killer content.”