Selective Revealing for Building Innovation Ecosystems: Incumbent Firms’ and New Ventures’ Behaviors

Incumbent firms and new ventures form innovation ecosystems that provide innovative value propositions based on their complementary resources. To jointly build these innovation ecosystems, firms must open their organizational boundaries by sharing information with each other. Research suggests that selective revealing contributes to tie formation in innovation ecosystems: As firms voluntarily, purposefully, and irrevocably disclose information to third parties—including competitors—they hope to gain access to other firms’ resources and thereby create multipartner innovations. However, theory on selective revealing and the formation of innovation ecosystems is still sparse, as the two phenomena have been studied from different management perspectives: open innovation research and ecosystem research. We overcome this disparity by drawing on the resource-based view to disentangle the threats of substitution and imitation that impact selective revealing behaviors in building innovation ecosystems. Specifically, we develop propositions on how the radicalness of innovations, incumbent firms’ diversity of knowledge bases and resource commitments, as well as new ventures’ use of power change tactics and intentions for ecosystem learning influence the propensity for selective revealing. We thereby theoretically illuminate information sharing tensions in emerging innovation ecosystems and derive new research impulses for open innovation and ecosystem research, including configurational and organizational learning perspectives on ecosystem building.