Learning Club, Home Court, and Magnetic Field: Facilitating business model portfolio extension with a multi-faceted corporate ecosystem

While scholarly interest in corporate level business model (BM) portfolios is increasing, little is known on the BM portfolio extension process. Positing that a corporate ecosystem can serve as an important context of this process, this paper addresses this gap by analysing an e-commerce giant's BM-launch-events that plot its BM portfolio extension journey. We find that the ecosystem, which comprises actors who hold resources and interact to coevolve, could be leveraged to facilitate a BM launch in manners beyond relying on activity-sharing synergies across BMs. Specifically, three configurations, each of which consists of a BM launch challenge, an ecosystem facet (i.e., Learning Club, Home Court, or Magnetic Field), and a leveraging strategy (i.e., Knowledge Orchestrator, Capability Bundler, or Service Aggregator), are identified to depict the associated process. Our findings offer a dynamic understanding of BM portfolio extension by integrating the actor-orientation of ecosystem and the activity-based view of BM. We also contribute to ecosystem literature by shedding light on a corporate ecosystem, revealing its generative properties, and linking its role to corporate strategy literature.