Businesses, Volume 5, Issue 3 (September 2025) – 3 articles

In today’s globalized and rapidly evolving technological landscape, innovation serves as a critical driver of economic growth and competitive advantage. The concept of an innovation ecosystem has emerged to elucidate the complex interactions among various stakeholders—including public sectors, startups, academia, businesses, NGOs, and venture capitalists—who collaborate and compete to foster technological advancements and economic growth. Open innovation emphasizes leveraging external ideas alongside internal efforts to enhance innovation capabilities, fostering more dynamic and resilient systems. Additionally, learning from innovation failures plays a crucial role in shaping effective strategies for growth, as startups often translate these learnings into robust innovation frameworks. Given the increasing complexity and interconnectedness of innovation ecosystems, traditional metrics often fail to capture their dynamic and collaborative nature. The European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS) provides a comprehensive framework for assessing the innovation performance of EU countries, offering insights into the overall health and performance of innovation ecosystems. This review article addresses the need to identify metrics and methods for measuring open innovation’s impact on innovation ecosystems. Building upon foundational theories and empirical findings, this study proposes a framework for evaluating the impact of open innovation on innovation ecosystems. It integrates insights from the academic literature with EIS metrics to develop robust methods for assessing open innovation’s multifaceted influence. This review article is particularly relevant as firms and policymakers strive to understand which metrics are most affected by open innovation and how these can be leveraged to enhance the performance and sustainability of innovation ecosystems. Full article

This study examines the impact of AI adoption orientation on innovation performance in multinational corporations (MNCs), emphasizing team innovativeness as an intervening mechanism and technology orientation as a moderating factor. Using data from 410 respondents collected via a snowball sampling strategy and analyzed through partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM), the findings reveal that artificial intelligence (AI) adoption orientation positively influences team innovativeness and innovation performance. Team innovativeness partially mediates this relationship, while technology orientation moderates the link between AI adoption and team innovativeness, underscoring the role of technological preparedness in enhancing innovation. The study contributes to theoretical understanding by integrating team dynamics and technology preparedness in AI-driven innovation. It provides practical insights for managers, policymakers, and organizational leaders on fostering an innovative culture and investing in technology skills to drive MNC competitiveness. Full article

The purpose of this conceptual and explorative study is to investigate whether health-promoting self-leadership could be used as a coping strategy enabling employees to deal with negative emotions in an organizational change process, providing a conceptual framework. A total of 18 faculty members from a Nordic university college were interviewed about their experiences, perceptions, and emotional reactions. The study reveals that new IT-systems; heavier workloads; and a lack of involvement, trust, and information, in particular, were stated to be the main reasons for negative emotions, detachment from the university-status aim, and the disruption of employee work–life balance. A few faculty members practiced fragments of what, in theory, is defined as health-promoting self-leadership to successfully manage the organizational change processes. Some were unconscious of their self-leadership practices, while others had no tools to enable them to cope with changes, leading to negative emotions. I discuss the findings regarding health-promoting self-leadership practice based on self-leadership, change management, and emotion theory. Based on both the findings in this study and relevant theories regarding self-leadership and coping strategies, I propose a health-promoting self-leadership-based coping model that could provide both individual and organizational health and performance benefits. Full article