De l’analyse méso-économique à la théorie des écosystèmes. Un essai de réinterprétation des travaux de Jacques de Bandt

This article revisits Jacques de Bandt’s contributions through the lens of contemporary debates on innovation ecosystems. Jacques De Bandt was a pioneer in advancing a meso-economic perspective that moved beyond the confines of traditional industrial economics. By emphasizing interdependencies and synergies among actors, he underscored the rise of services, the growing permeability of sectoral boundaries, and the need to conceptualize productive structures as dynamic systems. We argue that his work laid the foundations for a systemic view of industrial coordination and anticipated recent theorizing on ecosystems. Building on the knowledge-based view and a problem-solving perspective, we extend this line of inquiry to propose a framework for analyzing ecosystem governance modes. We distinguish innovation contexts according to the degree of problem complexity, and show that ecosystems represent an intermediate form of coordination between markets and hierarchies. They enable actor alignment and collective knowledge creation, with governance ranging from decentralized self-organization to more hierarchical structures orchestrated by a focal firm.