Abstract
As a result of increasing dynamics companies in the mechanical engineering industry are transforming their products into cyber-physical products and services. However, companies usually lack all the necessary competences, nor can they develop them efficiently. Thus, they have to collaborate with partner firms. This form of collaboration is often organized in “ecosystems”. Ecosystems are characterised by a multilateral set of partners who collaborate to develop a value proposition. We still know little about the everyday actions of the people involved in the emergence of those ecosystems. In this paper we analyse the actions of the actors people in developing an ecosystem from a practice-based perspective and study the question “which practices do actors use to allow an ecosystem to emerge?”. For answering this question, we use a case study at a mechanical engineering company which started to develop an ecosystem with a software company. For data collection we draw on ethnographical observations from different meetings and workshops (meetings during a 5 months observation period), 24 interviews and document analysis. Our results show that managers of both companies used specific practices such as “highlighting imperfections”, “prioritizing problems”, “joint definition of goals” or “sharing expectations” to prevent the abortion of the discussion in this ecosystem. This study contributes to the practice-based research on collaboration across domains and specify this research for the specific context of emerging ecosystems.