Mapping Innovation Beyond Markets: Actors and Ecosystems in the Digital Age

The 4Growth project is rethinking how innovation is monitored in agriculture and forestry. Traditional approaches tend to emphasise transactions—who sells, who buys, and at what price. But in today’s data-driven world, innovation often unfolds through networks of actors, data flows, and collaborative relationships.

To reflect this complexity, 4Growth has developed the concept of a digital ecosystem, a broader lens to understand how digital tools and data-centric innovations are created, shared, and adopted.

Who drives the digital ecosystem?

Our framework identifies five key actor types, each contributing to the innovation journey in a unique way:

• Digiproducers
  These actors develop new digital tools (digiproducts), often blending data and physical processes (for example, a precision agriculture startup using AI and drone imagery to optimise crop treatments).
• Collaborators
  These partners provide essential inputs—such as data, components, or technical expertise (for example, a weather data provider supplying real-time feeds to a farm management platform).
• Digiproduct users
  Farmers, foresters, or other end-users who apply these tools in real-world settings (for example, a vineyard manager using a disease forecasting app to plan fungicide use).
• Data intermediaries
  They collect, process, and distribute data between actors, ensuring trust and standardisation (for example, platforms like AgriGaia or AgriDataSpace that manage and aggregate agricultural data).
• Peripheral data users
  Actors that benefit from data without being part of the tool’s development or purchase (for example, researchers using open satellite data to assess forest health, or policymakers designing subsidy schemes).

These actors often operate across overlapping ecosystems—those focused on products and those centred on data. And they don’t work in isolation. Their interactions create ripple effects across the ecosystem.

Digiproduct vs Data Ecosystems

Our framework distinguishes between two types of ecosystems:

• Digiproduct ecosystems revolve around physical or analogue products enhanced by digital technologies—tools that collect data, enable interactions, or deliver services through intelligence and connectivity. Success here depends on usability, relevance, and cost-effective integration.
• Data ecosystems are networks built around the generation, exchange, and use of data itself. Here, value is created not from the data alone, but from how it is combined, analysed, and applied.

Actors may take on different roles across these systems—a company could be a data intermediary in one context and a digiproducer in another. This flexibility reflects the dynamic nature of innovation.

The power of social data externalities

One of the key advantages of digital ecosystems is the emergence of social data externalities—where data produced by one actor creates value for others:

• A farmer using a pest detection app might trigger alerts for neighbouring farms—even if they don’t use the app themselves.
• Forestry data from individual users can be aggregated to support regional climate adaptation planning.
• Robotic weeders or soil sensors might generate insights useful for collective decisions on conservation or fertiliser strategies.

Why this matters

This ecosystem view provides a richer, more accurate picture of how innovation spreads and creates value. It goes beyond market logic and highlights the importance of data sharing, collaboration, and role flexibility.

To understand digital innovation today, a look at ecosystems is required, not just markets. Identifying actors, overlaps, and data flows, reveals how value is co-created and where future innovation support should focus.

This blog is part of a two-part series exploring the 4Growth digital ecosystem framework for innovation monitoring.