The concept of innovation ecosystems has become popular during the last 15 years, leading to a debate regarding its relevance and conceptual rigor, not the least in this journal. The purpose of this article is to review received definitions of innovation ecosystems and related concepts and to propose a synthesized definition of an innovation ecosystem. The conceptual analysis identifies an unbalanced focus on complementarities, collaboration, and actors in received definitions, and among other things proposes the additional inclusion of competition, substitutes, and artifacts in conceptualizations of innovation ecosystems, leading to the following definition: An innovation ecosystem is the evolving set of actors, activities, and artifacts, and the institutions and relations, including complementary and substitute relations, that are important for the innovative performance of an actor or a population of actors. This definition is compatible with related conceptualizations of innovation systems and natural ecosystems, and the validity of it is illustrated with three empirical examples of innovation ecosystems.

在过去的15年中，创新生态系统的概念变得越来越流行，引发了有关其相关性和概念严谨性的争论，在本期刊中也是如此。本文的目的是回顾创新生态系统和相关概念的定义，并提出创新生态系统的综合定义。概念分析确定了在收到的定义中对互补性，协作和参与者的不平衡关注，并且除其他外，提议在创新生态系统的概念化中进一步包括竞争，替代品和人工制品，从而得出以下定义：创新生态系统是不断演化的参与者，活动和人工制品，以及机构和关系（包括互补和替代关系），它们对于参与者或参与者群体的创新绩效至关重要。该定义与创新系统和自然生态系统的相关概念化相吻合，并通过三个创新生态系统的经验示例来说明其有效性。