BEYOND ACADEMIC WALLS: CRUCIAL PLAYERS IN INNOVATION ECOSYSTEMS

Abstract

The production and expansion of knowledge are driven by innovation stakeholders, such as universities, which play a central role in boosting local innovation ecosystems, promoting territorial transformation and strengthening general well-being. In addition, other stakeholders also form the basis of innovation, contributing significantly to innovation processes. The objective of this article is to investigate which other stakeholders in the innovation ecosystem, besides universities, are presented in the literature in national and international research within the context of Applied Social Sciences, Information Science subarea. Regarding methodology, this study is characterized as a systematic literature review, of a descriptive nature and qualitative approach, supported by the StArt® software. The research protocol included the analysis of articles from the Scopus and Web of Science databases, covering the period from 2018 to 2022, with three filtering stages applied to a total of 1,014 retrieved articles. As a result, the selection process resulted in 139 relevant papers, 88 from Scopus and 51 from Web of Science. It is concluded that the systematic review made it possible to identify and characterize the main types of stakeholders that act alongside universities in innovation ecosystems (incubators, startups, spin-offs, accelerators, science parks, technology transfer offices and funding institutions), providing an overview of the multiple perspectives through which these theoretical reflections have been presented in the field of Information Science.