Governance Structures and Coordination Trade-offs: A Discriminating Alignment Theory of Innovation Ecosystem Architectures

The author wishes to thank Oliver Alexy, Chaitanya Kaligotla, Tommy Pan Fang, and Andy Wu for providing detailed comments on earlier versions of this paper and senior editor Gwendolyn Lee and two anonymous reviewers for their excellent feedback during the review process. The paper benefited tremendously from feedback the author received at the Decentralization in Organizations Conference at Imperial College London in 2023. The author especially thanks Carliss Baldwin, Michael Jacobides, Catherine Maritan, PK Toh, and Chris Tucci for feedback and conversations that influenced the paper’s development. Many ideas in this paper derive from the PhD dissertation the author completed at INSEAD. The author wishes to acknowledge the formative conversations he had about ecosystems and industry architecture with Philip Anderson, to whom he dedicates this paper. The author is grateful for developmental input on his dissertation provided by Vikas Aggarwal, Jason Davis, Vibha Gaba, Henrich Greve, Xiaowei Rose Luo, Henning Piezunka, Balagopal Vissa, other colleagues at INSEAD, and the many scholars with whom he interacted when attending conferences and workshops as a doctoral student. Any errors remain the author’s own.