Chapter 3: Ecosystems of Innovation in a Multi-Paradox Era

The current era is characterized by multiple paradoxes and multi-level stressors and crises that confront MNEs with new forms of complexity. Balancing competing demands requires capabilities for sensing and seizing opportunities and threats, and reconfiguring resources and structures to adapt and coevolve with the economic system. Within this context, as ecosystems of innovation are adaptive and (co)evolving places they allow MNEs to navigate such a landscape. Indeed, MNEs’ combinatorial capabilities – enhanced by ICTs – do create advantages from leveraging internal and external local resources and combining them with intra- and inter-organizational international ones. MNEs are therefore empowered within ecosystems, in which technologies, institutions and knowledge have become increasingly interconnected. Such an ecosystem perspective is essential to examine current paradoxical tensions, as those MNEs are facing in the twin and circular transition.