Innovation intermediaries as collaborators in shaping service ecosystems: The importance of dynamic capabilities

Innovation is increasingly a cocreative process centered on developing new solutions and (re)shaping service ecosystems. Recent research provides important insights into the capabilities keystone actors deploy to drive innovation in their role as a “shaper”. These studies highlight other non-focal actors as supporters of innovation, but their roles and capabilities in shaping service ecosystems are less clear. To address this gap, we study innovation intermediaries in the shaping of a service ecosystem that encompasses many service providers beyond a central keystone actor. Using data from multiple cases within a healthcare service ecosystem, we show how innovation intermediaries make connections among diverse organizations as both shapers and supporters of service-ecosystem shaping. Specifically, innovation intermediaries shape ecosystem configuration by organizing resources and relationships and support ecosystem governance by adapting institutional arrangements. Our data reveal that the integration of these shaper and supporter roles scaffold the enactment of a complex role of collaborator. This role is filtered through a recursive design feedback loop of reflexivity and reformation, and grounded in dynamic capabilities of sensing, seizing, and reconfiguring. We find that the collaborator role is critical for co-designing joint value propositions and advancing the efforts of keystone actors to shape service ecosystems.