Paper short abstract:

This paper based on ongoing ethnographic research in a multi-national high-tech corporation located in Israel to explore how an ecosystem of innovation is being formed, assembled and performed. This paper aims to describe the term ecosystem based on Bruno Latour's Actor-Network-Theory (ANT).

Paper long abstract:

This paper based on ongoing ethnographic research in a multi-national high-tech corporation located in Israel to explore how an ecosystem of innovation is being formed, assembled and performed.

In this research, innovation is conceptualized as an imaginative, non-linear and interactive exchange process. Thus an innovation in the making reveals the ecosystem, a set of closely intertwined and multiplied actors, objects and processes, human and non-human, associated and assembled together unto new shapes and combinations.

This paper aims to describe the term ecosystem based on Bruno Latour's Actor-Network-Theory (ANT). Both theoretically and methodologically, the term refers to the ways ethnography could "extend the list and modify the shapes of those assembled as actors and participants and to design a way to make them act as a durable whole" (pg.72)1.

1 Latour, B.2005. Reassembling the Social an Introudaction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford University Press.