Joachim Stonig

Supplement to the special issue on "Business Ecosystems" in the journal "Die Unternehmung" (4/2019)

Business ecosystems are currently transforming many established sectors. Understanding how ecosystems emerge and influence strategic outcomes is thus an important concern for academics and managers of incumbent firms alike. Ecosystems result from configuration processes where an ecosystem leader aligns multiple independent but complementary organizations to offer an integrated solution to meet a specific and often complex customer need. In this review, we analyze empirical research on the processes and outcomes of ecosystem emergence. We structure our findings along three analytical levels, highlighting the changes that ecosystems engender in competitive dynamics, the inter-organizational relationships, and the required internal organization of the participating firms. Ecosystem participants, leaders and complementors have to navigate the creation phase dynamically and then develop the strategic activities suited to their eventual role in the ecosystem.

Many incumbent firms are confronted with technological changes that threaten their complementary assets. Alas, there is scant research about the intra-organizational processes that enable effective responses to this type of discontinuity. Our multiple case study in the European chemical industry illustrates how incumbents manage strategic initiatives that develop new complementary assets, namely digital platforms for selling and distributing chemicals. Drawing on research of strategy processes and complementary-asset discontinuities, we develop a multi-level process model of gradual uncoupling: to build novel complementary assets, initiatives must first uncouple from horizontal relationships with line and functional middle managers, and subsequently uncouple from top management control. We show that alternative incumbent outcomes, such as knowledge transfer and/or modifications of existing complementary assets, result from processes that fail to engage in uncoupling. Our main contributions are to (1) provide a process perspective on incumbent adaptation to complementary-asset discontinuities, (2) contextualize extant literature on strategy processes for this type of change, and (3) detail how incumbents can leverage their core business to build digital platform businesses.