Complementarities and competition: Unpacking the drivers of entrants' technology choices in the solar photovoltaic industry

Abstract

Entrants in new industries pursue distinct technologies in hopes of winning the technology competition and achieving sustainable competitive advantage. We draw on the complementary assets framework to predict entrants' technology choices in an emerging industry. Evidence from the global solar photovoltaic industry supports our arguments that entrants are more likely to choose technologies with higher technical performance and for which key complementary assets are available in the ecosystem. However, diversifying entrants are more likely to trade off superior performance for complementary asset availability whereas start‐up entrants are more likely to trade off complementary asset availability for superior performance. This difference is largely due to diversifying entrants with pre‐entry capabilities related to the industry. The study offers a novel illustration of how complementarities and competition shape entry strategies. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Energy storage deployment and innovation for the clean energy transition

“…Finding complementarity between increasing storage performance through energy density and lowering cost will be necessary for both vehicle and grid-scale applications. Storage technologies can learn from asset complementarity driving PV market growth and find niche applications across the clean-tech ecosystem, not just for pure kWh of energy storage capacity 39 . It is likely that multi-utility storage applications may surface as a result of innovation and deploymentdriven cost reductions.…”

Maneuvering in Poor Visibility: How Firms Play the Ecosystem Game when Uncertainty is High

“…Hence, existing literature seems to posit that the ultimate value proposition of the to-be-created innovation ecosystem can be constructed following an almost linear plan. The focus is thus put on questions of behavioral maneuvering -which is deduced from the clearly envisioned future -to ensure this value proposition will come true and that the focal firm becomes instrumental in this process (e.g., Adner & Kapoor, 2010;Ansari, Garud, & Kumaraswamy, 2015;Kapoor & Furr, 2015;McIntyre & Subramaniam, 2009;Wareham et al, 2014).…”

“…Firms understand clearly which assets they can leverage in ecosystems and derive a concomitant design of technological and social interdependencies by selecting the right partners (Adner & Kapoor, 2010;Adner, 2012;Adner & Kapoor, 2016;Kapoor & Lee, 2013;Kapoor & Furr, 2015). Alternatively, they discover technologies and industry-level value systems or architectures as given sets of interdependencies in which they need to identify and occupy the strategic bottlenecks to attain control (Baldwin & Woodard, 2007;Baldwin, 2015;Hannah & Eisenhardt, 2015;Iansiti & Levien, 2004;Jacobides & Tae, 2015;Pagani, 2013) (arrow A).…”

Unraveling Platform Strategies: A Review from an Organizational Ambidexterity Perspective

“…In this respect, heterogeneity of agents within the ecosystem can be a source of ecosystem differentiation [90,95,96]. Specifically, when customers have different preferences for a platform's particular characteristic, platform owners can simultaneously launch different versions of the platform that better fit the needs of different types of users [97].…”