Triple Helix Collaborative Innovation and Value Co-creation in an Industry 4.0 Context

Digitalization and Industry 4.0 promote a fundamental technological disruption that requires industry, research and government institutions to revisit their roles within the innovation ecosystems. Actors in this environment need to understand value co-creation during interaction and collaboration. The purpose of this study is to investigate the triple helix collaborative capabilities in an Industry 4.0 ecosystem context. The case under study is a Finnish national publicly funded research project involving five global manufacturers, three research institutions, and several small- and medium-size enterprises (SMEs). The results demonstrate that practices related to adaptivity, experience sharing, SME co-innovation and scale up can enable the ecosystem to be managed in a dynamic way. Yet, this type of operation requires the adoption of the ecosystem approach with mutual trust, intensive collaboration and the identification of common aims among the project participants. The presented co-innovation model can be used to design innovation ecosystem projects in the future.