In this paper we conduct a qualitative case study on how knowledge management occurs within a regulated safety context that seeks to make its knowledge sustainable. Thus, organizations, which operate in this context, try jointly, to create, share and, above all, sustain this knowledge for a long time. The most effective way to meet their objectives is to redesign their inter-organizational architecture into a non-competitive knowledge ecosystem. The back and forth between the research field and the theory, led us to ask the following research question: how a regulated safety context should evolve into a non-pre-competitive knowledge ecosystem? To answer this research question, we adopted an organizational perspective, integrating knowledge management and organizational innovation streams. Our results show the emergence of a non-pre-competitive knowledge ecosystems where actors’ interactions are strictly collaborative due to its main goal: sustainable and inter-organizational knowledge management. This emergence is enabled by internal and inter-organizational innovation, i.e., the development of a knowledge management process. Organizational innovation is articulated within the actors’ own (intra-organizational) knowledge systems, but also through the knowledge flow that is exchanged at the inter-organizational level. To achieve this, ecosystem governance is ensured by a focal actor (through regulatory legitimacy) who assumes the role of orchestrator, to sustain the knowledge flow through coordination and collaboration of ecosystem members.