The role of sociotechnical imaginaries in the emergence and unfolding of an ai-based innovation ecosystem

Literature on Innovation Ecosystem has primarily emphasized structural features, roles, and governance mechanisms, giving limited attention to the imaginaries of the future carried by the ecosystem’s partners and their expectations from such an ecosystem. In this article, we adopt the concept of sociotechnical imaginary to understand ecosystem emergence and unfolding. Drawing on a longitudinal qualitative study of an AI-based ecosystem in the social housing renovation sector, we reveal three sociotechnical imaginaries—technological innovation, cyber-management, and techno-solutionism—that motivate cooperative expectations of the partners, facilitating their early alignment. However, as the ecosystem implementation unfolded, these same imaginaries generated conflicting expectations about proof of value, organizational transformation, policy, and strategic priorities, reducing internal momentum and creating resource bottlenecks. Our findings highlight sociotechnical imaginaries as active structuring forces for ecosystems’ emergence and unfolding. Accordingly, we make two contributions: (i) we extend ecosystem research by providing a novel perspective on the drivers of their emergence and evolution, showing how sociotechnical imaginaries and expectations function as central mechanisms of both alignment and misalignment, (ii) we strengthen the analytical power of sociotechnical imaginaries by highlighting their performative role in innovation ecosystem emergence.