The Role of Ecosystem Actors in Shaping Value Creation in Emerging Ecosystems

Building on the extant literature on business ecosystems, this paper examines how alliances with actors playing different roles in an emerging industry, the electric passenger vehicle, drive value creation. It draws on an original dataset of 213 alliances initiated between 2000-2015 to analyse whether and how connections between different actors in the emerging electric vehicle ecosystem, namely original equipment manufacturers, complementors, suppliers and institutions influence the value a focal firm is able to create, proxied by new electric patents granted. Our findings suggest that alliances with competing firms undermine value creation while among the alliances with non-competing firms, those with complementors are the most beneficial. By shedding light on how the value creation outcomes of collaborations among different actors in an emerging ecosystem vary depending on their roles, our study offers a significant contribution to both the ecosystem and alliance literatures.