Manoeuvring Legacy Ecosystems

We study ecosystem development in the healthcare sector from the perspective of an incumbent innovator. We conducted a comparative case study and followed five corporate ventures in their efforts to develop an ecosystem to materialize their innovative idea. Our study illuminates that incumbent innovators are intertwined in a complex interplay between the demands of the legacy of existing ecosystems and the envisioned ecosystem. We identified three strategies to balance the legacy ecosystem with the envisioned ecosystem: conforming, circumventing, connecting. The implications of our study are that we explain how ecosystem development in support of new value propositions is a process that includes not only the initiation of new relations but is also a process of continuous reconfiguration of the legacy relations of envisioned ecosystem participants.