Exploring the Process of Business Ecosystem Emergence from Value Chains: Insights from the Chinese Mobile Phone Industry

A business ecosystem is a community of multiple co-evolving actors with interdependent product offerings organized around a specific value proposition. While the extant literature focuses on these two structural elements of ecosystems that existed ex ante, we challenge this notion with our core discovery that ecosystem actors emerge in an ex post dynamic process. With a longitudinal qualitative study of the vertically disintegrated part of the Chinese mobile phone industry, we develop a two-dimensional process model of ecosystem emergence, namely the temporal dimension that delineates three processal stages of ecosystem emergence and the spatial dimension that highlights an architectural pattern of reciprocities between value chain and resource pool to enable the ecosystem emergence. We also offer inter-temporal enabling conditions during ecosystem evolution. These findings enable us to complement the ecosystem literature by elaborating the antecedents, outcomes, and enabling conditions of ecosystem emergence in relation to multiple types of ecosystem actors. We also shed light on the value chain (re-)configuring process which derives from the reciprocity between value chains and ecosystem resources. 商业生态系统是由多个共同演化的行动者构成的，这些行动者常围绕一个具体的价值主张提供相互依赖的产品。尽管当前的文献假设行动者和价值主张这两大生态的结构性要素都是事前存在的，但本文挑战此一观点，并发现生态的行动者是通过动态涌现过程逐步出现的。作者对中国手机行业中垂直分离部分进行了纵向、质性研究，开发出一个包含时间和空间两个维度的生态涌现过程模型。时间维度描述生态涌现的三个阶段，空间维度强调生态涌现中价值链和资源池互动的架构形态。同时，作者也提供了生态演化中跨越各个阶段的赋能条件。本文通过厘清生态涌现时多种不同行动者出现过程的前因、后果和条件，为现有的生态文献提供了新的理论洞见。本文也通过展示价值链和生态资源的互动，阐明了价值链的构建（及重构）过程，为价值链的文献做出了贡献。