Plays nice with others? Multiple ecosystems, various roles and divergent engagement models

Abstract

In strategic management, the term meta-organisation is discussed as a network of firms and individuals in which members coexist, collaborate and evolve through a set of relationships and together form a larger organism. We focus on the meta-organisation form of an ecosystem in the IT industry, which often is based around a technical architecture or platform. Studies often discuss one network and selected members in such a network, but few mention that firms can work in multiple ecosystems and need to apply divergent engagement models. We study how firms engage in multiple ecosystems through three qualitative case studies. The article contributes with the following: (1) firms often operate in multiple ecosystems for which they need to dynamically adapt their engagement strategy. (2) Firms are striving to balance between strategic divergences: power versus symbiosis and a collaborative approach versus a competitive approach.

Keywords:

• business ecosystems
• strategy
• innovation
• high-tech industry

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the participants of the three case studies for their time and involvement in the study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Petra M. Bosch-Sijtsema is an associate professor at Chalmers University of Technology, Construction Management, Gothenburg, Sweden. She has a Ph.D. in Management and Organization from Groningen University (The Netherlands) and a licentiate degree from Lund University (Sweden). She has worked at universities in The Netherlands, Finland, Sweden and USA. Her research interests are in new ways of working, distributed and virtual work, knowledge work, ICT, innovation and knowledge creation, and collaboration within and between firms. She has published in journals like The Journal of Product Innovation Management, International Journal of Project Management, Group and Organization Management, Technology Analysis and Strategic Management and The Journal of Knowledge Management.

Jan Bosch is professor of Software Engineering and director of the Software Research Center at Chalmers University of Technology, Software Engineering, Gothenburg, Sweden. Earlier, he worked as Vice President Engineering Process at Intuit Inc. and led open innovation efforts and was head of the Software and Application Technologies Laboratory at Nokia Research Center, Finland. He has a Ph.D. degree in Software Engineering from Lund University, Sweden. His research activities include open innovation, innovation and software ecosystems, innovation experiment systems, compositional software engineering, software architecture, software product families and software variability management. He has published well over 250 papers, has written and edited several books and is part of numerous programme committees.