The Role of Alliance Partners in Shaping Value Capture in Emerging Ecosystems

Firms across industries are increasingly part of ecosystems of interconnected actors characterized by multidimensional and complex relationships. Among these relationships, alliances play a prominent role in firms’ innovation activities, bridging gaps between their knowledge bases. These activities shape not only the interactions between firms, but also influence the industry architecture, which describes the ways in which activities along the value chain are divided among industry participants, their roles and interdependencies. Both research on industry architecture and business ecosystems highlight how firms’ ability to capture value increasingly depends on the value creation activities of other actors. Blending extant literature on industry architecture and ecosystems, this paper examines an emerging industry, electric and hybrid cars, and characterizes the relationships among firms, investigating the connections between different actors in the ecosystem, such as OEMs, complementors, suppliers and institutions, to analyse how each firm’s alliance activity with these different actors influences their value capture.