Technology standard-setting alliances and architectural advantage in an emerging industry

The architecture of an industry defines who actually profits from a technological innovation. Thus, firms seek to influence the industry architecture to maximize their share of value appropriation. One way to achieve such architectural advantage is through alliances aimed at setting technological standards. Despite a recent surge of interest in ecosystems, platforms and architectures, we still know little about mechanisms through which alliances contribute to create bottlenecks and shape an industry architecture. This paper draws preliminary conclusions on patterns of alliances in the emerging electric car market from a unique longitudinal dataset of 397 international alliances (2000-2010). We show that two major car manufacturers (GM and Toyota) currently dominate alliance activities the emerging industry. Further data analysis will investigate their impact on the industry architecture.