To solve or to occupy: Addressing hybrid bottlenecks in innovation ecosystems

Bottlenecks have recently emerged as one of the key objects of inquiry in research on innovation ecosystems. The broader literature is split into two streams on technological and strategic bottlenecks, relying on the implicit assumption that strategic bottlenecks emerge from technological bottlenecks. In practice, however, many ecosystems get “stuck” in the transition from technological to strategic bottlenecks. This results in the formation of hybrid bottlenecks that combine the features of both technological and strategic bottlenecks. The existing recommendations regarding strategies that can be used to address bottlenecks fail to explain actors' strategic responses in these situations. We address this gap by conducting an exploratory multiple case study of strategies actors apply to address the hybrid bottleneck of public charging infrastructure in the innovation ecosystem of battery electric vehicles. We combine resource dependence theory and resource-based theory to show how actors combine different strategies to address hybrid bottlenecks based on how heavily they depend on the availability of bottleneck resources to create value in the innovation ecosystem, their expectations about the future value of these resources, and the ambiguity and uncertainty of the ecosystem's future evolution.