How Focal Firms Navigate Resource Complementarity Uncertainty of Innovation Ecosystems in Emerging Economies

ABSTRACT The highly collective uncertainty of the innovation ecosystem is portrayed as unclear resource complementary participants, unstable allocation of participants' relationships, and untimely updating of complementary rules, which led to the complicacy of complementary resource gap identification, the generation of complementary resources, as well as final innovation results. Considering the significant role of innovation ecosystems in emerging economies and the limited understanding of the resource complementary process of innovation ecosystem, we conduct an abductive, exploratory multi‐case analysis to identify the strategies employed by the focal firm within the innovation ecosystem to overcome this collective uncertainty and further reveal the full picture of innovation ecosystem's resource complementarity process. Our study contributes to innovation ecosystem literature by deconstructing ecosystem‐level collective uncertainty in the context of emerging economies. We also fulfill the complementarity research by identifying four resource complementary strategies based on an integrated framework and providing a comprehensive understanding of not only what ecosystem complementarity is but also how it comes from .