A cooperative game theory systems approach to the value analysis of (innovation) ecosystems

Journal article, 2024

This paper presents a new approach for analyzing ecosystems in general, be they technical and/or economic, or even biological, with special reference to innovation ecosystems. The approach is grounded in systems theory and game theory, especially cooperative game theory. Theory approaches to ecosystem analysis in previous research are reviewed. Procedures are presented for assessing value creation and value capture in an ecosystem structured by complementary and substitute relations in an artifact subsystem and analogous cooperative and competitive relations in an actor system, CS-relations for short. Some measures of structural importance in an ecosystem structured by such CS-relations are presented and compared, especially the Shapley value. A number of simple but illustrative examples and applications are given. The paper finally proposes a formal representation of an ecosystem as being a pair of cooperative games linked by a map between them, representing ownership and control relations between artifacts and actors. The article is kept at a moderate level of formalism.