Overseas innovation ecosystem collaboration in the healthcare sector

Leveraging innovation collaboration and introducing novel data-driven healthcare services in new markets typically depends on functioning innovation ecosystems that facilitate local and global collaboration between industry actors, hospitals, and academia. However, as the healthcare sector has unique features including ethical, regulatory and privacy restrictions and slow adoption of new technologies, it can be argued that existing theorizing may not fully capture the dynamics and development of overseas ecosystems in this field. Aligning disparate stakeholder interests can be notably challenging, and approaching hospital markets is complicated, time-consuming, and expensive, especially in international settings such as those bridging Western and Eastern countries. Many actors consider engagement in collaboration carefully, weighing the balance between benefits and costs. This study explores how overseas innovation ecosystem collaboration emerges and evolves in a healthcare context, focusing on the challenges and benefits influencing this development, and how these are addressed. Based on a seven-year longitudinal case study involving actors from Europe and Asia, we show how companies engaging in innovation ecosystem collaboration can benefit from the orchestration of such collaboration by other actors than companies. Extending earlier knowledge, we explicate how academic actors can step in to orchestrate collaborative innovation activities, influencing factors such as regulatory frameworks, funding instruments, resource availability, leadership and strategic alignment, and involvement of mature companies in a fashion that removes the related barriers or even turns challenges into enablers.