Complementors as ecosystem actors: a systematic review

As downstream actors providing innovations that enhance the value of the core proposition, complementors have been recognized as indispensable in many definitions of ecosystems. The increasing attention they have received in the past years demonstrates the concern to enrich our knowledge of complementors. With a hybrid approach of bibliometric and content analyses, this systematic literature review aims at a clearer understanding of complementors in an ecosystem setting. The findings confirm complementors’ strategic role in enhancing the ecosystem’s focal value proposition and impacting the ecosystem survival and success, more intensely since 2018. Several characteristics of complementors are also revealed. Despite autonomy being their most affirmed feature, an inconsistent understanding of complementors in different types of ecosystems is revealed. This study represents a pioneering attempt to systematically understand complementors as ecosystem actors through extant literature. Various research gaps in the extant ecosystem research were also identified, providing research directions in terms of complementors’ coopetitive interactions, strategies, and challenges in ecosystems.