Future Sensemaking Beyond Own Business Self-Interests: Insights from Offshore Wind Energy Innovation Ecosystems

This research explores how participants in an innovation ecosystem, operating without a focal firm, can collaboratively envision and create societal value beyond their individual business goals. Using participatory action research, the investigation focuses on two cases within the offshore wind energy sector, involving four complementary enterprises and nine enterprises that are both complementary and competitive. The findings suggest that ecosystem participants can collectively pursue opportunities for sustainable value creation that surpass the interests and goals of indi-vidual firms. This shift towards a future-oriented, ecosystem-wide perspective was driven by the focus on ecosystem-level value propositions and the dynamic organizing of heterogeneous knowledge, individual behaviors, and organizational behaviors, enabling successful fu-ture-oriented sensemaking. The research process highlights practices that led to significant inno-vation outcomes, such as halving investments, reducing accidents and rework, accelerating opera-tional flow, and fostering long-term investments, like a floating port for installation and mainte-nance improvements. This study enhances understanding of how future-oriented sensemaking in innovation ecosystems without a focal firm can drive innovation and societal value creation, offering insights for practitioners, academics, and policymakers on governance and collaborative efforts to enable value creation in innovation ecosystems.