Changing Space(S): How Innovation Ecosystems Develop in Unsettled Industry Spaces: a Review and Research Agenda with the Empirical Case of the UK Space Sector Ecosystem

This working paper reviews the academic discourse on the key sub-streams of innovation-related literature on ecosystems, with a main focus on the concept of innovation ecosystems. The paper highlights hitherto unanswered theory implications rising from the literature and discourse surrounding ecosystems, and contributes to the literature on innovation and new market formation by identifying a research agenda to enrich the study of early-stage innovation ecosystems that integrates theoretical approaches beyond the current focus. The proposed research agenda builds on the growing and increasingly robust analytical approaches in the study of business ecosystems, but foregrounds expanding attention from looking at the structure of mature ecosystems in settled industry spaces to instead looking at the social practices and institutional negotiation of early-stage ecosystem relations in unsettled industry settings, particularly in the spanning of boundaries between legacy stakeholders and new ventures. Building on the findings and open questions highlighted by the review section, the subsequent empirical appendix of the paper outlines and discusses current dynamics in the UK Space sector from a perspective of early-stage ecosystems.