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.

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In this article, we explore how new capabilities emerge and solidify in new ventures that are faced with fundamental uncertainty from their environment. To do so, we draw from the organizational and entrepreneurial literature on cognition and capabilities. Using initial qualitative evidence from a multifirm study in the context of new venture internationalization, we develop a cognition-based model of capability emergence in new ventures. Our findings extend the capability development and learning implications of internationalization to the fundamental character of organizing processes in start-ups. Moreover, we derive avenues for future entrepreneurship research on the origins and evolution of capabilities in new ventures.

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Research Summary Strategic openness—firms voluntary forfeiting of control over resources—seemingly challenges the premise of the resource‐based view (RBV), which posits that firms should control valuable, rare, and inimitable (VRI) resources. We reconcile this apparent paradox by formalizing whether and when firms—consisting of resource bundles and deriving competitive advantage from exploiting selected VRI resources—may maximize profitability by opening parts of their resource base. As such, our article refines RBV‐related thinking while supporting the theory's core tenets. Notably, we illustrate how a common‐pool resource can become a source of competitive advantage and how firms may use openness to shape inter‐firm competition. Managerial Summary Conventional wisdom holds that firms must control scarce and valuable resources to obtain competitive advantage. That being said, over the past decade, many firms—among them Computer Associates, IBM, and Nokia—embarked on open strategies and made parts of their valuable resources available for free. These decisions pose an obvious conundrum, which we solve in our article. We use a mathematical model, grounded in principles of the resource‐based view, to show why and under what conditions open strategies will succeed. Firms significantly improve their performance when (a) opening resources reduces their cost base while (b) strongly increasing demand for their still‐proprietary resource(s). We also explain how openness can reshape markets by weakening competitors, particularly in highly rivalrous environments.