**5. Conclusions**

The growing interest in university-led innovation was investigated with the prism of the knowledge ecosystem that has helped reconstruct the experience of collaboration between the University of Naples and several global IT and large manufacturing players. Creating a learning space within a g-local context, the knowledge ecosystem observed in the case analysis has grown through an efficient and inclusive organization. This has oriented toward a more performance-based resource allocation, management, and coordination system that has mostly innovated the training approach to nontraditional students of large and generalist university based in a dense urban and less-developed area. Multilateral relationships between the university and its global and regional partners have developed complementarities, but competition within, across, and outside the ecosystem may compromise the sustainability of knowledge-based value creation. In the uneven development context of co-innovation, the presence of the university can enhance multiple innovation mechanisms that create value at different scales. Multiscale value creation processes require investigating embedded, adaptive, and emergent complementarities that encompass only some actors in some niches of the system. A multilayer network analysis focused on the meso-level can identify communities in the ecosystem and recognize the strategic role of actors within them.
