The resource-based view in business ecosystems: A perspective on the determinants of a valuable resource and capability

Abstract

Business ecosystems are an important form of inter-organizational cooperation and potential driver of a company’s success. Strong ecosystems strike a balance between their actors’ cooperative value contribution and competitive value appropriation. However, our understanding of the value that an ecosystem actor’s contributed input (any resource and/or capability) adds to the ecosystem is so far limited. Building on a review of the resource-based view (RBV), the institutional view, and the ecosystem literature, we conceptualize the determinants of a provided input’s value within ecosystems as a function of its contribution to the value proposition, scarcity (bottleneck), complementarity, and the input provider’s reputation. Our findings extend the RBV to the ecosystem context and allow us to contribute to the emerging literature stream on managing business ecosystems.