Selective revealing for building ecosystems: a conjoint experiment with managers of established firms

Abstract

Researchers have identified selective revealing, that is, the voluntary, purposeful, and irrevocable disclosure of information to third parties, as a mechanism in ecosystem building. However, there is a lack of understanding of the ecosystem‐level factors that drive managers' decisions to share such information in emerging ecosystems. To shed light on how managers of established firms engage in selective revealing when building ecosystems, we draw on the resource‐based view. We theorise about the information revealing behaviour of established firms' managers, based on the threats of substitution and imitation that cause trade‐offs in emerging ecosystems of established firms and new ventures. We test our hypotheses with a choice‐based conjoint experiment analysing 640 decisions of managers responsible for ecosystem building. We find that managers from established firms are more likely to engage in selective revealing when the ecosystem aims at radical innovation (over incremental innovation), when other established firms have high knowledge diversity (over a low knowledge diversity), and when new ventures demonstrate technological superiority (over being on par with established firms' technologies). Our study therefore illuminates which ecosystem‐level constructs influence managers' decisions to reveal information when co‐building ecosystems, even when no immediate payoff is recognisable.