Wednesday, September 11, 2019 | 2:00pm-3:30pm | Room 335, HSBC Business School Building

Abstract

This paper examines the potential to leverage a focal firm’s established ecosystem in order to facilitate a business model (BM) launch event. Based on a longitudinal analysis of the development of JD, the largest retailer in China by revenue, we suggest that firms that go beyond reliance on similar actors performing similar activities by facilitating existing actors to perform new activities and managing to attract new actors will enjoy a higher level of ecosystem leverage. We elaborate such a non-similarity-based logic by disentangling the facets of ecosystem leveragability and the focal firm’s corresponding leveraging strategies. By integrating the ecosystem perspective and the BM lens, this study enhances our understanding of the BM diversifying process through which a BM portfolio could take form; meanwhile, it extends the ecosystem literature’s focus from ecosystem as structure at the business level to ecosystem as lever at the corporate level.