Nurturing Business Ecosystems for Growth in a Foreign Market: Incubating, Identifying and Integrating Stakeholders

This paper explores the process of nurturing a business ecosystem to facilitate corporate growth in an unfamiliar foreign market with high product uncertainty and no network resources. The authors conducted a qualitative, longitudinal study by examining a successful business case — ARM (a leader in microprocessor intellectual property) — to demonstrate how firms nurture their business ecosystems to develop in the Chinese market and to stimulate demand even with- out the advantages of resources and stabilized products. Based on the road map method, this paper develops a framework of creating a business ecosystem in three sequential stages namely, incubating complementary partners, identifying leader partners, and integrating ecosystem part- ners. The findings enrich classic international business and demand chain theories by highlighting different roles stakeholders adopt to cope with uncertain products in a foreign market. In practical terms, these findings also provide Mode 2 knowledge with application context (Gibbons et al., 1997) on entering new markets by building up an ecosystem