This thesis intends to contribute to the academic understanding of a recent buzzword: ecosystems. It addresses how ecosystem evolution is led by organisations under various macro and micro level effects, such as the institutional context, ecosystem formation, or individual employees. The thesis aims to address the direction of these effects via a compilation of three separate research papers with different methodological approaches.
The first study is a systematic literature review in the form of a thematic synthesis, and provides a general outline of how the ecosystem management of a central organisation has been considered in previous research throughout an ecosystem's emergence, development and renewal/decline stages. It suggests that the cooperation or competition orientation in the business model of the ecosystem is determined by the ecosystem type, value complexity and relative resource power of the organisations.
The second abductive study investigates how competing ecosystems of a home country spread in a different economic context. The research focuses on ecosystems that originate from a developed economy, and compete in an emerging economy with institutional voids. It argues that institutional conditions in the destination economy and the business logics of the ecosystems interplay to determine ecosystem establishment and spread by affecting entrepreneurial activities.
The third study is concerned with individuals, especially the impact of employees on the ecosystem evolution of large companies. The quantitative case study shows the nature and demographic sources of evolution in the lower organisational hierarchies.
Overall, the thesis focuses on the firm as an actor that guides the evolution of its ecosystem via its decisions which are affected by institutional, ecosystem-based and individual level influencers. Mechanisms and contingencies are identified within the emergent framework.