Abstract. Despite the use of Living Labs continuing to spread further with the increase of global complex challenges, the question of how the multi-stakeholder collaborative innovation has been governed and orchestrated within multifaceted innovation ecosystems has remained unanswered. In this paper, orchestration refers to such purposeful actions as governance, facilitation, mediation, interpretation, or brokering used to enhance multi-stakeholder innovation co-creation, particularly when aiming to solve wicked problems while
guaranteeing the system’s resilience and economic vitality. Orchestration helps innovation ecosystems to
reach their common goals and their members to create and capture value. This paper introduces a method
used to research the role of orchestration in multi-stakeholder innovation. The first findings on what has
facilitated and hindered the fairly large, mature and successful innovation ecosystems with regards to
achieving their goals underline the significance of the informal side of innovation activities as opposed to
formal governance models and actions often highlighted in the literature and policy documents.
Additionally, from the methodological point of view, it was learned that based solely on publicly available
information on the innovation ecosystems, most of the first findings would not have been uncovered.
Instead, thematic interviews where the interviewees could freely reflect on the research questions enabled
these findings to be unearthed. The restricted case findings cannot be generalised, therefore further
research is needed.