The drastic simplification of communication between the deliverer of content and its consumers, which takes place in many spheres, for example:  journalism (blogging), marketing (SMM in social networks), hotel industry (cases of Airbnb, Couchsurfing), transportation (cases of uber, blablacar), also results in a fast deconstruction and redesign of educational services.

The European educational systems become more dynamic:  there is an increase in the internal diversity of the educational actors, the exponential increase of minor and single players [Uline & Kensler, 2019]. In addition to the formal educational institutions (schools, secondary vocational education, universities),  significant variety of new institutional forms appear: maker spaces, fab labs, accelerators, case communities, business schools and others [Aguilar-Forero, & Cifuentes, 2020]. 

New actors bring new business models to education from other spheres, create profiles of cooperation and cause sporadic exchange of innovative practices and the transfer of educational initiatives [Andriushchenko, et al, 2020]. They tend to build effective interactions with business, local communities and strengthen their network communication, these partnerships defining the structural characteristics of the transforming educational system  [Barokas, & Barth, 2018].

Different mechanisms of interactions between the formal system and new actors appear. For example, local education departments create catalogs of non-system players (often EdTech) that could be used by schools and universities during the pandemic. 

New actors also move to urban cultural environments that provide space, materials and resources for educational purposes including research and training projects [Agranat, 2020].

Thus, the emergence of new actors on the education map sets new models of partnership and cooperation. There has been plenty of research revealing and analyzing these processes.  In particular, the Triple Helix, Quadruple Helix, and Quintuple Helix [McAdam, & Debackere, 2018; Carayannis, et al., 2012] models are aimed at describing different collaborations and the inclusion of the state, business, society, activists and environmental issues in the educational sphere. However, these models are designed for higher education and are not adapted for the general education sector. This makes it difficult to describe the relations between actors, relying on constructions that do not cover the entire field concerned.

Along with the topics of institutional collaboration, the topics concerning the social infrastructure of knowledge creation, transfer and commercialization [Colapinto & Porlezza, 2012], the expansion of networking opportunities [García-Terán & Skoglund, 2019] are also investigated.

At the same time, a serious research deficit seems to be the absence of a working model of the innovative educational environment. First, there are only few researches to study institutional landscape and patterns of collaborations of different actors at the level of secondary, vocational, additional and higher education. Second, there is a lack of understanding of how learning infrastructures are created so quickly and arbitrarily, and what metrics can be used to assess the effects of the platform principle.

This paper is a contribution to educational economics, innovative economy theories as well as ecosystem modeling. This study provides a rare glimpse on «sharing» economy and platform principles in the educational sphere. Employing regional data we build a coherent model of the collaborations, partnerships and competitive strategies that shape educational environment.

For the purpose of this study there was elaborated a method for mapping the regional structural landscape. With the aid of these principles the “portrait” of the regional educational ecosystem was performed. Educational ecosystem map is presented as a socio-cultural network that contains its most significant nodes - actors and links between them. It reflects spatial and geographical diffusion (in city spaces and vectors "centre - regions") and inter-institutional interaction ("spiral" model). The educational mapping ecosystem is based on several principles: - Functional diversity of educational actors - diversity of their tasks and innovative educational practices; - Species diversity of actors and the placement on the map both traditional and new providers of educational services; - Openness and constant renewal of the ecosystem actors compound, the dynamism of the map. A set of sociological methods was used with the aim of collecting and processing row data: - expert polls with educational market representatives (10 respondents); - semi-structured interviews with educational institutions representatives (50 respondents); - a quantitative survey of educational startups representatives (100 individual questionnaires); - thematic coding techniques and principles of grounded theory for qualitative data analysis; - exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis for quantitative data analysis. The number of respondents included: innovators, educational managers, ed-tech startups leaders, open spaces that conduct educational events, integrators of educational resources, schools (teaching staff), cultural institutions (museums, theaters, libraries). This made it possible to identify the interpretation of the whole situation and partnerships in the educational innovations field according to the vision of different stakeholders. The Russian educational system is considered as a research case. At the same time, we suggest that the methodology presented in jur paper could be used by EU member states for mapping their local ecosystems. Case studies collected from different countries could enrich the emerging picture and contribute to the development of an ecosystem approach in education.

The main expected outcome of our paper is the research framework aimed at educational ecosystems description. This framework may be applied to European research cases with peculiar cultural and regional features. Using the example of the Russian sample we present the cartography of the educational field including main players (traditional and new actors) and interactions between them. The configuration of innovation deficits and gaps at different educational levels is built as well. As a result of empirical research the paper contains: Classification of actors and artifacts that fill the educational ecosystem; Dynamic classification diagram of new actors’ competitive strategies; Typology of relationships between actors in the educational ecosystem including mechanisms for integrating new actors into the formal system, and patterns of interaction of new actors and local communities. We present a description of two patterns: new actors’ initiatives can either be integrated (partly or fully) into the educational program of formal institutions, or be implemented in parallel with the formal system. We identified «sharing» economy principles in the educational sphere: the maximum use of the distributed knowledge across society, crowdsourcing of knowledge, the development of freemium educational products, integration of social capital for the development of educational resources.

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