An important role in innovation ecosystems comes to the task of coordinating actors’ contributions. This coordination task is especially complex in an ecosystem’s bottleneck areas. Additionally, the requirements for this task constantly change as the ecosystem evolves. Although existing studies have stressed the importance of coordination choices in these contexts, it remains unclear, how coordination choices in bottleneck areas change as nascent innovation ecosystems evolve. We fill this gap by empirically tracking central actors’ coordination choice changes in bottleneck areas of their ecosystems over the course of the first phases of the ecosystem lifecycle. We apply a multiple case study research design, focusing on original equipment manufacturers of battery electric vehicles and the coordination mechanisms they apply in bottleneck areas. We show how coordination choices evolve over an innovation ecosystem’s lifecycle, and reveal the rationale behind coordination choice changes. The results of this study provide guidance to practitioners in coordinating other actors so that the emergence of their ecosystems can be promoted despite bottlenecks.
