Exploiting an End-to-End Process for Innovation Ecosystem Analysis

Abstract

There has been extensive research about the factors that create companies their competitive advantage. Resource-based view and dynamic capabilities are the leading research branches of defining the internal creators of companies’ sustainable success in their market environments. Moreover, the literature claims that companies’ sustainable competitive ad-vantage is established through the companies’ rare and imperfectly substitutable resources and capabilities, and dynamic capabilities. Business process management and end-to-end process understanding has gotten progressively popular amongst the companies. Better process understanding has been claimed to increase the companies’ understanding of the inter-dependencies between their different stakeholders, subprocesses, systems and external environment. Additionally, the process literature stresses that with a more process-oriented approach the companies can both improve and develop their processes more efficiently, and thus gain a competitive edge in the markets.

As the market environments are getting more complex, the potential of one company to possess all the needed resources and capabilities to succeed decreases. The ecosystem theory stresses that business ecosystems are becoming the leading structures for pursuing the overall performance success. In other words, the companies’ success is becoming more and more dependent on their ecosystem partners’ resources and capabilities. As these dependencies to other stakeholders increase, so do the potential risks related to them. The innovation ecosystem literature argues that it is worthwhile for the companies to investigate the depend-ency-related risks and their effects to the companies’ overall performance. Hence, the companies can create a better ecosystem strategy as they are better able to take the identified dependency-related risks into account. Additionally, the literature provides a prepared structure for executing an innovation ecosystem analysis. In this thesis it was investigated whether an end-to-end modelled process could provide sufficient information about the companies’ innovation ecosystem risks both internally and externally. Additionally, it was investigated whether the end-to-end process model could work as an only source of information for the innovation ecosystem analysis.

This thesis was conducted as a case study. First the company’s end-to-end process was modelled by using semi-structured interviews. The finished end-to-end process was then used as an information source to analyze the dependency risks related to the company’s innovation ecosystem. To support the risk analysis structure, a framework from the ecosystem literature was used. The analysis served evidence that an end-to-end process could provide information of the company’s dependency risks related to the internal and external processes. Especially the internal interdependencies to other subprocesses, systems and stakeholders were revealed well. As for the external dependency risks, the end-to-end process provided sufficient information about the dependencies related straight into the end-to-end process. However, the information could not be declared sufficient to represent the entire external environment and its dependency risks. As a result, it was stated that an end-to-end process should be used as an information source when conducting an innovation ecosystem analysis. However, it should not be used as an only information source. Additionally, to further verify the achieved results, other information sources and risk analysis frameworks should be tested, and the achieved results with different methods should be compared.