Organizing in ecosystems: Actors, structure, and dynamics

Research on business and innovation ecosystems has mainly focused on addressing questions such as how ecosystems are organized by their focal actor and further, how the focal actor steers the collective action in the ecosystem to support the achievement of the strategic goals of the focal actor. Empirically, the extant literature has focused on mainly mature and relatively stable ecosystems. In this study, we draw attention to emerging ecosystems where multiple different actors partake in designing the nascent ecosystems. We show that in the emergence phase of the life cycle of the ecosystem, the ecosystem encounters instabilities upon which actors act and attempt to bring order and organization. These attempts in turn lead to three main forms of governance in the ecosystem: centralized authority, decentralized authority, and self-organization. By the examination of three emerging ecosystems, we offer an alternative account on distributed organizing in ecosystems and shed light on how the organization of the ecosystem and governance emerge at interplay.