Service innovation in business ecosystem: The roles of shared goals, coopetition, and interfirm power

Abstract

A business ecosystem consists of a hub-firm (ecosystem leader) and a community of actor-firms. Building on the extended resource-based view and business ecosystem literature, this article explains the factors that contribute to an actor-firm's service innovation. To test our framework, we obtained 100 dyadic, time-lag responses from a tourism resort ecosystem in Indonesia. We found that coopetition is more valuable than shared goals in improving an actor-firm's service innovation. Coopetition is inefficient when the reward-mediated power is high, while shared goals are more beneficial when the non-mediated power is high. These findings indicate that hub-firms should exercise caution regarding their efforts to nurture shared goals, coopetition and interfirm power to promote service innovation. Overall, this study advances the extended resource-based view by highlighting that shared goals and coopetition allow an actor-firm to acquire important resources from its ecosystem relationships with other actor-firms to facilitate service innovation. More importantly, effective access to these relationship-based resources depends on interfirm power.