A key challenge for firms in sustainable business ecosystems (SBEs) is to create and capture environmental, social, and economic value. Whilst these firms create sustainable value, they operate within contexts of sustainability transitions that are often replete with uncertainty. We conduct a longitudinal study on the ecosystem strategies of utility-scale solar developers and how they adapt their strategies to respond to uncertainty. Our findings show that successful solar firms, those that capture economic value and survive while creating environmental and social value, adopt a bottleneck strategy, which solves solar energy’s variability bottleneck, mitigates technological uncertainty, and grows the SBE. Other successful firms use a component strategy by creating ecosystem links with upstream complementors to purchase solar technology, with downstream complementors to sell solar energy, and thereby avoid exposure to and mitigate technological, competitive, and market uncertainty. They continuously reallocate ecosystem resources and create ecosystem links with development banks and communities to cope with regulatory and political uncertainty and deliver social value. Successful firms develop more solar plants and avoid more carbon emissions to deliver environmental value. Unsuccessful firms, those that fail to capture economic value and go bankrupt, adopt a system strategy by taking upstream and downstream ecosystem positions in which they are negatively impacted by competitive, technological, and regulatory uncertainty. Our findings contribute to literature on SBEs by showing how firms cope with uncertainty in sustainability transitions by adapting their ecosystem strategies for greater sustainable value.
