Ecosystem Collaboration and Absorptive Capacity in SMEs: Structures, Paradoxes, and Root Causes
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Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play a significant role in economic development and regional innovation. Their ability to develop knowledge independently, however, is restricted by their consistent lack of resources. Ecosystem collaboration has been identified as a strategic mechanism through which SMEs can access external knowledge and resources to compensate for internal capability limitations. However, there is little understanding of the factors that enable collaboration to translate into absorptive capacity in SMEs, and what makes inter-firm ecosystem collaboration consistently fail for SMEs to deliver absorptive capacity benefits and the contradictions this creates. The study addresses two research questions: first, how different ecosystem collaboration structures and mechanisms promote absorptive capacity in SMEs; and second, why collaboration paradoxes arise within ecosystems and what factors prevent SMEs from converting collaborative engagement into absorptive capacity gains. The theoretical framework is based on absorptive capacity theory, the Triple Helix model and the SECI model of organisational knowledge creation. The study follows a qualitative research design. The empirical data consists of 23 semi-structured interviews across ecosystem actors (SMEs, higher education institutions, and intermediaries). The data was analysed using the Gioia methodology.
The findings reveal that when a set of structural and relational enabling mechanisms is present, ecosystem collaboration leads to substantive value for SMEs. A crucial distinction is found between the recognized collaborative value among SMEs and the realized gains of absorptive capacity among SMEs. Four collaboration paradoxes are found to happen systematically: Ungoverned and reactive collaboration patterns; an IP protection dilemma driven by competitive concern, cultural self-reliance, and IP literacy gaps; the misrecognition of surface-level interaction as meaningful collaboration; and an externalisation deficit in which collaborative learning is not converted into documented organisational knowledge. Six interlocking root causes underlying these paradoxes were identified: SME resource constraints acting as a structural limit on engagement depth; a temporal and incentive mismatch between HEIs and industry; knowledge loss through personnel instability; a governance vacuum in collaboration management; weak internal knowledge exploitation infrastructure; and an orchestration gap in which no ecosystem actor takes sustained responsibility for activating multi-party collaboration. Two emergent findings extend the framework: Customer relationships emerge as the primary channel for knowledge creation, and knowledge flows in HEI–SME collaboration prove bidirectional. The study concludes that the central barrier to absorptive capacity development in SMEs through ecosystem collaboration is the inability to translate the available resources. Addressing this requires both internal capability development within SMEs and the introduction of sustained ecosystem orchestration.