The emergence of the ecosystem management function in B2B firms

Ecosystem management (EM) encompasses all the activities required to design and manage ecosystems for distributed value creation. Although the literature represents a growing body of knowledge on the unique challenges related to operating within an ecosystem, there is a limited understanding of EM from an organisational perspective, including its general purpose (mandate and theoretical reasons), structures, boundaries, and roles. Through a rich inductive case study of five business-to-business (B2B) firms, we examine EM as a function to address the interplay among the ecosystem, systemic innovation (a digital platform), and the focal firm. Our results indicate that the EM function entails managing multilevel configuration co-evolution (organisation, ecosystem, and platform), ecosystem regulation (strategically changing such configurations through increases or decreases in the ecosystem's stability), and ecosystem learning (learning orchestration and progressive learning). Based on these findings, we propose a new theoretical framework for EM: the EM function. Our study contributes to B2B ecosystem research by increasing the empirical knowledge and theoretical understanding of EM.