Abstract:Innovation ecosystems are increasingly regarded as important vehicles to create and capture value from complex value propositions. While current literature assumes these value propositions can be known ex-ante and an appropriate ecosystem design derived from them, we focus instead on generative technological innovations that enable an unbounded range of potential value propositions, hence offering no clear guidance to firms. To illustrate our arguments, we inductively study two organizations, each attempting to create two novel ecosystems around new technological enablers deep in their industry architecture. We highlight how ecosystem creation in such conditions is a systemic process driven by coupled feedback loops, which organizations must try to control dynamically: firms first make the switch to creating the ecosystem following an external pull to narrow down the range of potential applications; then need to learn to keep up with ecosystem dynamics by roadmapping and preempting, while simultaneously enacting resonance. Dynamic control further entails counteracting the drifting away of the nascent ecosystem from the firm's idea of future value creation and the sliding of its intended control points for value capture. Our findings shed new light on strategy and control in emerging ecosystems, and provide guidance to managers on playing the ecosystem game.

The programme worked well to improve performance by focusing on interdependencies within a large part of the acute care subsystem but did not have the same impact at the overall health care system level. This has important implications for the design of policy and associated programmes which seek to effect whole system reform, or at least are realistic about the magnitude of change they can achieve.

Organizational adaptation results from coupled processes nested across multiple levels (Klein and Kozlowski 2000;Klein et al. 1999). There has been a strong call for a quasi-natural organization science that accounts for the effects of coupled processes across different levels (Lewin and Volberda 1999;McKelvey 1997). Yet, most work on organizational adaption has been conducted implicitly at a single or dual level of analysis. To remedy this, detailed empirical cases with more than two levels of analysis are required to address the interactions between organizational context and the intraorganizational dynamics (Greenwood and Hinings 1996;Tracey et al. 2011) .We explore how the classical problem of limited cognitive representation influences the way agents coordinate their search efforts across organizational boundaries and across multiple levels. We . Specifically, we explain how complex cooperation in hierarchical systems can emerge and subsequently unravel. We show how cognitive limitations can hide opportunities for collaboration and mutual improvement. We demonstrate the multilevel dynamics induced when agents at various levels broaden their cognitive representations to include higher-order epistatic interactions -i.e. interdependencies between components which affect system performanceand synchronize their adaptive search across organizational boundaries. Our demonstration is based on a longitudinal case of a large change programme in a national healthcare system, where there was a powerful rhetoric on the need for "whole system change". This aimed to make agents in all its constituent parts aware that they are interdependent and to emphasize the need for collaboration to uncover opportunities for mutual performance improvements:"This new approach is about getting the NHS [National Health Service] in Scotland to work as a single, whole system. We need all of the partners in the system to realize that they are interdependent. Action in one part of the system has an impact elsewhere. And we need the partners to understand that we all need to change." NHS Scotland, Policy document, 2005

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