Table 3 Different empirical research designs used for ecosystem research
| Representative studies | Ecosystem construct | Setting | Selected data sources | Operationalization of ecosystem construct |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ethiraj (2007) | Bottleneck | Personal computer (PC) components | Industry journals, PC Magazine, and PC World | Component constraints identified in the product reviews |
| Adner and Kapoor (2010) | Bottleneck (suppliers, complementors) | Semiconductor lithography |
Industry journal, Solid State Technology; Interviews | Count of articles that discuss the technical problems in components and complements |
| Kapoor and Lee (2013) | Organizational form for complementors | Healthcare | American Hospital Association annual surveys | Hospital-physician organizational form (arm’s length, alliance, integrated) |
| Hannah and Eisenhardt (2017) | Bottleneck | Residential solar system | Interviews; newspaper and magazine articles, blogs, analyst reports | Component that most constrains the growth or performance of the ecosystem due to poor quality, poor performance, or short supply |
| Kapoor and Furr (2015) | Bottleneck | Solar photovoltaic (PV) | Industry journal, Photon International annual equipment surveys | Commercially availability of deposition and contact equipment in an emerging industry |
| Zobel et al. (2017) | Bottleneck | Solar photovoltaic (PV) |
PV Insights, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, Fraunhofer ISE | Share of cost for components and complements in solar PV systems (BOS) |
| Toh and Miller (2017) | Complements | Communications equipment | Patents | Jointly cited patents from different patent classes |
| Kapoor and Agarwal (2017) | Platform-ecosystem complexity | Smartphone | comScore US smartphone-installed base database |
Sum of the squares of the monthly shares of the US-installed base for smartphone OEMs |
| Wen and Zhu (2017) | Platform complementors’ innovation and pricing strategy | Smartphone | Mobile app analytics firm | Updates to smartphone app and app pricing |
| Agarwal and Kapoor (2018) | Platform complementors’ connectedness | Smartphone | Apple iTunes | App’s connection with platform components/modules and other apps |