The emergence process, through which actors construe the value creation, value capture, and coordination functions of an ecosystem, has recently sparked considerable scholarly interest. To date, most studies have focused on the central role of “champions”, actors controlling key resources, in constructing the ecosystem. However, many ecosystems emerge under conditions of distributed agency, in which initiative and key resources are spread across multiple nominally independent actors. We investigate the processes along which the three canonical functions of an ecosystem tend to emerge when champions are lacking. We conduct an in-depth, historically embedded study of the emergence of the Dutch ornamental crop breeding industry, a globally leading ecosystem that has been built under conditions of distributed agency. Our process model shows that distributed-agency ecosystems tend to emerge through various phases, in which the simultaneous construction of the value creation and value capture functions often leads to frictions between the individual economic incentives and the normative values that are collectively held by all actors in the ecosystem. Due to the property of distributed agency, actors must act collectively in self-enforcing institutions or appeal to third parties to resolve these frictions. We find that these coordinating institutions engage in three types of work: values work to advocate and enforce a set of normative values, friction-resolving work to stimulate collective value creation and to impose legal and moral boundaries on value capture rule structures, and sedimentation work to harmonize the new elements and the persisting old structures of the ecosystem.