Integrating Research on Alliances and Ecosystems

In this paper we draw together the alliance and ecosystem literatures. We start by noting that alliances and ecosystems share in common the objective of value co-creation through bringing together resources of a modular and complementary nature, the main distinction being the number of actors who participate in the value creation process. We refer to this as differences in degree. In contrast, whereas the value creation process in alliances entails the bringing together of known resources belonging to known actors, in the case of ecosystems neither the actors nor the resources they possess are necessarily known ex ante. The notion of generativity captures this idea and results in differences between the two organizational forms with respect to processes of governance and outcomes of interest. We refer to these as differences in kind. Because generativity leads to differences in kind, we contend that generativity is a key distinctive feature that uniquely characterizes ecosystems and distinguishes them from other interorganizational forms of organizing, even more so than modularity and complementarity, which are largely present in alliances to varying degrees. We also extend our analysis to alliance portfolios and find that while they are similar to ecosystems in that they both require the focal firm to manage external actors as a whole, the means of doing so differs between the two, as alliance portfolios entail managing many different objectives while ecosystems entail orchestrating one system-level goal. Taken together we suggest that a partial integration between alliance and ecosystem literatures has the potential to generate fresh insights and spark new and potentially fruitful research directions in both streams.