Strategy Formation in Emerging Ecosystems - A Process Perspective

This research explores the formation of strategies in emerging ecosystems with no central orchestrator. In the past decades, ecosystems as inter-organisational structures that facilitate value creation beyond firm boundaries gained prominence in both theory and practice. To this date, research largely focused on established ecosystems and paid relatively little attention to ecosystem emergence. Particularly, research investigating how firms develop their strategies in nascent ecosystems that form without a central orchestrator remains scarce. However, the increasing presence of digital technologies facilitates the organic formation of ecosystems through the convergence of products and services across firm- and industry-boundaries.
This thesis addresses this gap by examining how firms engage in emerging ecosystems. First, by focusing on the distinct activities that firms deploy it uncovers the processes that underpin the development of the ecosystem strategy. Second, by examining how the activities change over time, the study develops a process-perspective on ecosystem strategies to account for the role of temporality and the inherent dynamics that surround ecosystems.
The study adopts an exploratory multiple case study design to investigate the strategy formation process of firms in the smart home ecosystem in Germany. It builds on qualitative data to develop a process-oriented framework that depicts three stages of strategy formation underpinned by four ecosystem-relevant processes. It also identifies a typology of four strategic approaches that firms pursue in the nascent ecosystem.
The research contributes to the literature on ecosystems by offering a process perspective on strategy formation in emerging ecosystems, thus also highlighting how the firm-level development of strategy relates to the formation of the ecosystem. It also adds to research on ecosystem strategies by proposing that in nascent ecosystems, strategies are not focused on value creation and capture, but instead rest upon a relational approach that emphasises joint value discovery and value creation.