PhD Supervision

This theses addresses an important and complex issue in strategic management. For many years scholars, and practitioners have regarded firm strategy through two different and parallel lenses (Attour & Burger-Helmchen, 2014). The first focuses on intra-firm issues, whereas firms’ leadership drives competitive strategy by designing and implementing elaborated forms of value capture, creation, and delivery. In management strategy, this process is normally studied under the business model concept (Zott, Amit, & Massa, 2011). The second focuses on inter-firm issues, whereas the aim is to understand the interdependencies and co-evolution of firms within their ecosystems (Moore, 1996). For three decades, these two concepts were mostly studied separately. However, strategic management scholars have recently noted that the joint adoption of the business model concept and ecosystem provides a richer theoretical background to address contemporary phenomena (Demil, Lecocq, & Warnier, 2018). In her thesis, Leticia Foerster identified that this joint adoption is emphasized by the need to understand how business model innovation occurs at the ecosystem level. Examining the innovation challenges faced by the urban mobility ecosystem, she also identified that such a framework would help to examine how a leader adopts an ecosystem strategy through business model innovation in two kinds of emergent ecosystems:  those that are at the birth phase of their life cycle, and those that are at the renewal phase. 

Leticia Foerster's PhD thesis tries to answer the following research question: How can leadership at the ecosystem level foster or hinder ecosystems' emergence through business model innovation?