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 without 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 partners. 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.