Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

10-2025

Abstract

The evolution of innovation ecosystems hinges on the effective coordination between ecosystem leaders and complementors. While ecosystem-sponsored architectural innovations create new technological opportunities for complementors, they may unintentionally disrupt the performance of complementor products that were originally developed based on legacy architectural designs. This study provides empirical evidence of these disruptive effects and explores how complementors’ alignment with the ecosystem leader mitigates such challenges. Focusing on Apple’s release of Core ML—a proprietary artificial intelligence module—in its mobile ecosystem, we employ a difference-in-differences design to investigate variations in complementor performance after adopting this ecosystem-sponsored architectural innovation. Our findings reveal that complementors’ technological and flow alignment with the ecosystem leader is critical for minimizing performance disruptions and enhancing value creation during ecosystem evolution. This study enriches our understanding of architectural changes and complementor heterogeneity in innovation ecosystems.

Keywords

alignment, architectural innovation, complementor, ecosystem, technological evolution

Discipline

Strategic Management Policy | Technology and Innovation

Research Areas

Strategy and Organisation

Publication

Journal of Management

First Page

1

Last Page

26

ISSN

0149-2063

Identifier

10.1177/01492063251368267

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Copyright Owner and License

Authors-CC-BY_NC

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1177/01492063251368267

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