Not So Protected After All—Managing Paradoxical Tensions in Mission‐Oriented Innovation Ecosystems

This study explores how actors within mission‐oriented innovation ecosystems (MIEs) experience and manage paradoxical tensions while pursuing systemic change. MIEs are increasingly leveraged to address complex societal challenges through cross‐sector collaboration and coordinated innovation efforts, particularly in sustainability transition contexts such as the European Union's climate‐neutral cities mission and energy transition ecosystems. Using paradox theory as an alaytical lens, we examine learning, organizing, performing, and belonging tensions in a mission‐oriented ecosystem within the Dutch protein transition from animal to plant‐based protein food sources to understand how collaboration unfolds across diverse organizational types. Although MIEs are often expected to provide relatively protected environments for sustainable innovation and collaboration, our findings show that actors within these ecosystems continue to experience significant tensions related to governance, power asymmetries, and competing interests. Our findings show that tensions are persistent and emerge from the heterogeneity of ecosystem actors, who differ in goals, resources, and collaborative practices. We identify eight tensions related to learning (dyadic vs. multi‐partner collaboration; sharing vs. appropriating knowledge), organizing (relational trust vs. formal control), performing (collaboration vs. competition; adapting vs. shaping institutional structures; short‐ vs. long‐term vision), belonging (selective vs. full engagement; inclusive access vs. exclusive control of knowledge), and interdependencies across these categories. We identify phased collaboration, selective openness, hybrid governance, temporal alignment, mission‐based legitimization, inclusive orchestration, differentiated engagement, and widening access to information as strategies that actors employ to cope with these tensions, noting that responses vary across organizational types. This study advances paradox theory by extending it to interorganizational, mission‐oriented ecosystem contexts, showing how interdependent tensions are dynamically reconfigured and governed across actors, while offering practical insights for orchestrating collaboration under conditions of persistent and uneven tensions.