Abstract: The notion of ‘innovation ecosystem’ is an emerging concept and has become popular in the industrial/sectoral economic development context. This paper reviews the literature on industrial innovation ecosystems (IIE) from 1993 to 2018 for discerning the new scientific truths and state-of-the-art in this area. Using the topic retrieval method, the data set covers 513 articles obtained from the Web of Science Core Collection (SCI-EXPANDED, SSCI, CPCI-S, CPCI-SSH, BKCI-S, BKCI-SSH, CCR-EXPANDED, IC). Descriptive statistics are used to describe the basic features of the literature. Then, text mining methods including cluster analysis and semantic mining are combined to identify and analyze the research status and evolution mode of some international IIE. Moreover, this article may shed some lights for future research about industrial innovation ecosystem. The research findings may contribute to the theoretical development in the context of IIE as follows:Firstly, the development process of the industrial innovation ecosystem is investigated through a historical retrospect on the origin and development of IIE. Started from the innovation system (IS), the national innovation system (NIS) and the regional innovation system (RIS), the academic realm combines the concepts of 'innovation system' and 'ecosystem’ to push the term 'innovation ecosystem'. Then, the 'industrial innovation ecosystem' is proposed and studied in an industry context. Thus, the literature on discussions of Industrial Innovation Ecosystem has increased significantly in the past five years.Secondly, by means of the quantitative methods, such asbibliometrics, visualized knowledge graph, and comprehensive evaluation of entropy weight, the influence of the countries and journals is analyzed in IIE field. The countries’ influence in the IIE research has been available in a prioritized area worldwide including the USA, England, France, Australia, Belgium in descending order. When compared with journals’ share and impact, the influence appeared to be substantial in six journals, such as Strategic Management Journal, Research Policy, MIS Quarterly, Harvard Business Review, Ecological Economics in descending order. Thirdly, reviewing the identified research topics through the analysis of LDA topic model, six core influence research themes are extracted in IIE field. Theme 1 focuses on industrial platforms, technology platforms, tools platforms and related strategic management research in industrial innovation ecosystems. Theme 2 refers to the respective of resources and environmental factors of ecosystems such as knowledge, technologies, products, services, soft-circumstance conditions and so on. Theme 3 focuses on the relationships among the innovators in the industrial innovation ecosystem and on the different research scenarios along with the process of interaction among the innovators. The main research scenarios include bilateral relations, the industrial background, and the whole industrial ecosystem. Theme 4 concentrates on the characteristics and patterns of the industrial innovation ecosystem, such as the mechanisms, co-evolutionary development and so on. Theme 5 mainly concerns the methods, models and theoretical frameworks of the industrial innovation ecosystem, which aim to provide the fundaments toward the biology-inspired theoretical construction and advancement. Theme 6 focuses on the related infrastructure upon public policies and service, the institutional framework and tools of policy in the industrial innovation ecosystem.Fourthly, for future studies, six research trends of industrial innovation ecosystem are elaborated as follows: (1) The industrial innovation ecosystem based on platform and digital technology needs to be further examined. (2) The research of industrial innovation ecosystem might consider the integrated empirical verification method. (3) On account of the increasing interdependence and technology fusion among communities and the blurring of industrial boundaries, it is needed to redefine related concepts in the developing field of IIE. (4) Under the specific industry boundary conditions, the principles of decision-making and behavioral chains in industrial innovation ecosystem need to be further studied. (5) Government intervention and its policies for the industrial innovation ecosystem. (6) Investigations on the development models of the industry innovation ecosystem in the multi-industry scenarios.Fifthly, the nature of research methods in IIE field are reviewed, and it indicates that: the specific ‘appreciative’ methods have declined significantly, the ‘formal’ methods have a dramatic growth; the usage of combination of appreciative and empirical methods or the combination of formal and empirical methods have increased obviously, and these two combination types have gradually evolved into the pivot of methods in the IIE research.Although much progress has been made in the IIE field, there are still some issues that need to be underlined and figured out. Existing studies have fully explored the overall characteristics of the industrial innovation ecosystem. However, few studies have brought together the specific industrial innovation ecosystem and its various components, especially deep into the specific industrial innovation system with the clarified particularity of the industry. It is needed to strengthen the examination on industrial innovation ecosystem under different national and social background. For example, the aging of populations has a rapid development in the worldwide and is one of the highest achievements of humankind. The changes in population structure have had a profound impact on the demand of product and service innovations and have formed an important challenge on the development of socio-technical transition. The existing research has not yet introduced the changing population structure (degree of age-related aspect) into the industrial innovation ecosystem, and further study its influential mechanism. The ecological theory method has the nature and characteristics of the general methodology. However, further research is needed for bridging the emerging research area of the industrial innovation ecosystem. There is a big gap to lead to new scientific truths of the industrial innovation ecosystem, such as how to apply the concepts of diversity, stability, resilience, and health and the evaluation methods of the ecology into the context industry innovation ecosystem. Moreover, most of the current research on IIE is based on scientific literature, patents, statistical data, and survey data. Although these data play an important role to discover the development trend and evolving nature of industry and technology, they have the drawback on the time lag. It is prominent to consider how to integrate with stronger and opportune network information into the research of industrial innovation ecosystem.

Key words:  industry, innovation ecosystem, topic clustering, bibliometric