Ecosystem strategy: Who should adopt it and how?

The value of entrepreneurship and the entrepreneurial ecosystem: Evidence from 265 cities in China

“…The entrepreneurial ecosystem mainly focuses on entrepreneurial factors in the ecosystem, highlighting the importance of the community's support for entrepreneurs and startups. Based on common beliefs or propositions, the necessary economic and social conditions can coalesce to facilitate entrepreneurial activities (Ma & Hou, 2020). Furthermore, Spigel (2017) and Spigel and Harrison (2018) proposed that while there is no agreement yet on a single exact mixture of elements, they can be categorized as cultural, social, and material.…”

“…Jacobides et al (2018) captured the ecosystem as "a group of interacting firms that depend on each other's activities." Multilateral interactions may foster ecosystem-specific unique competencies and competitive advantages (Ma & Hou, 2020). Furthermore, the entrepreneurial ecosystem may, in turn, favor adolescent companies in the context of fierce market competition (Hechavarría & Ingram, 2019).…”

Understanding the relationship between networks, startup risk-taking behaviour, and digitalization: the role of ecosystem coopetition

“…Considering the impact of the ecosystem echoes the current trend in the field of entrepreneurship, that is, employing the concept of ecosystem to understand how digitalization affects entrepreneurial activities and the interactions among entities (Song, 2019: 570;Sussan & Acs, 2017). Entities in the ecosystem create value based on a shared vision, and thus, there will be complicated interactions between enterprises, including cooperation and competition (Elia, Margherita, & Passiante, 2020;Ma & Hou, 2020). Coopetition refers to a dynamic and paradoxical relationship, enabling companies to involve in cooperation and competition simultaneously (Bengtsson & Kock, 2000;Czakon, Srivastava, Le Roy, & Gnyawali, 2020;Raza-Ullah & Kostis, 2020).…”

Building and sustaining innovation ecosystems

“…The strategy management literature emphasizes individual maximum competitive advantages when firms formulate and implement business strategies (Porter, 1980;Santos and Eisenhardt, 2009;Williamson and De Meyer, 2012). In contrast, some recent ecosystem studies have shown that focal actors execute ecosystem-specific strategies to achieve ecosystem-level competitive advantages (Holgersson et al, 2018;Joo and Shin, 2018;Ma and Hou, 2020). We extend this emerging body of the literature by identifying the important strategizing form of strategic suboptimality, the sacrifice of short-term individual benefits to bring long-term ecosystem-level competitiveness.…”

“…Along with co-evolution challenges, scholars have shown that new focal ventures should develop ecosystem-specific strategies to address these challenges Thomas, 2014, 2018). According to and Ma and Hou (2020), the design and execution of ecosystem-specific strategies have the dual goal of creating ecosystem-wide competitiveness and keeping the focal actors' leadership role. In light of this rationale, economic strategies are designed to address economic co-evolution challenges by inviting the economic actors' contributions to complex innovations and commitment to emerging ecosystems.…”