Ecosystem innovation as the Stepping into other people’s shoes

Our societies face many pressing challenges regarding healthcare and the environment, wich include - to name a few - climate change, biodiversity conservation, air and water pollution. These issues are obviously highly complex and often context-related.Also, their analysis is not always straightforward, as their origin and development are affected by many social, economie, politica!, historieal and environmental agents and/or drivers of change often operating within well-established social and ecologica! systems (Chavez-Avila & Monz6n-Campos, 2005; Sterner et al., 2019; Avelino et al., 2019). The constant search for new solutions-or simply the improvement of existing plans-to reach ONU 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), is benefiting innovative small businesses, start-ups and NGOs focusing on social economy at local, regional and nationallevel (Basile & Cavallo, 2020). In the COVID-19 era the linear model of innovation (from theoretieal to applied research) is turning into a non-linear one, in whieh the need for innovation comes from many social and economie agents and a grow­ ing number ofinstitutions-either for-profì.t or non-profit-are involved in the production of new operating models and solutions. This means that innovation is now the result of highly collaborative relationships, which are often of multidisciplinary nature and not necessarily aimed at creating new products but more and more often at addressing new social and economie needs (Chesbrough & Di Minin, 2014; Howaldt et al., 2015; Smorodinskaya & Katukov, 2015). In this scenario, the relationships existing among actors can be seen as uncertain or volatile, are often complex and always of a collective nature. Economie and social stakeholders such as companies, scientists, NGOs, etc. are more and more involved in this collective effort. As such, ali actors involved in these innovation processes share their responsibilities and are therefore co-responsible for the results achieved (Parmar et al., 2010; Blok & Lemmens, 2015). The chapter aim is both to contribute to the ecosystem scientific litera­ ture advancement and to stimulate to some empirica! applications. To reach these objectives, the work, in the first part, will present a theoretical and definitional background, considering the most important literature published in the last 15 years, finalised to highlight the differences between ecosystem and network and how this difference is weighty in the current moment signed by a pandemic phenomenon. In the second part of the work, the authors highlight the crowdsourc­ ing approach as the ecosystem application to prove that companies now do not compete with each other only by employing their own resources and know-how according to stand-alone strategies, but rather moving them toward new business models based-among others-on shared resources, network externalities and government. Finally, the authors track the conclusion and try to individuate some future scientifìc implications.