What Facilitates User Innovation in the Business Ecosystem:

The Coordination of Intermediary that Enables Value Creation of Medical Services

Abstract

This paper elucidates how feedback from users and customers are leveraged to innovation of a medical service, and how the business ecosystem emerges to create its stakeholders’ value. They include patients, families, doctors, nurses and municipalities as well as service providers. Although affluent extant literature has been interested in articulating these systems, they have mainly focused on the process of emergence, functionality, the complementarity and modularity that are crucial to value creation, especially in the IT industry. In those contexts, a focal firm as Google, Amazon etc. encourages software companies and suppliers to collaborate with each other. Then, when it comes to medical services, will a provider function as the focal firm? And, if they are an entrepreneurial company, how can it coordinate with users and customers to lead to innovation? We conducted interviews in Denmark and Japan to study the structure of the ecosystem and the process of its emergence. The case study illustrates how the independent stakeholders would collaborate for value of creation, and an intermediary organization can strategically link them in the ecosystem. The implication is that forming of the ecosystem may lead to promoting healthcare innovation and related policies.