Interorganizational Networks, Bottlenecks and Architectural Advantage in an Emerging Industry

Firms seek to influence the architecture of an industry to maximize their share of value appropriation. One way to achieve that is through alliances aimed at creating strategic and technological bottlenecks. 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’s architecture. This paper specially investigates the link between network centrality and value capture in the electric vehicles industry. We draw preliminary conclusions from a dataset of 30 companies embedded in an industry network of 267 alliances in the year 2010. We show that network centrality highly correlates with market share as a proxy for value capture, indicating the high influence of bottleneck positions on architectural advantage in this emerging industry.