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Mobilization is a critical business interaction process within which cooperative ties with different stakeholders are formed to pursue strategic goals through collective efforts (Grodal & O’Mahony, 2017; Håkansson et al., 2009; Iacono & Kling, 2001). Mobilization aims at persuading and gathering people or organizations to contribute their resources to solve a problem (Bekkers et al., 2011; Mouzas & Naudé, 2007), which is commonly deemed important, such as the computerization movement (Elliott & Scacchi, 2008). Especially in the era of social media communities and platforms, how to attract followers and participants to forge a power of the crowd has become a pivotal managerial issue (McAfee & Brynjolfsson, 2017; Y. Q. Zhu & Hsiao, 2021). Thus, mobilization is concerned with the competitive advantage of firms, because it facilitates the shifting of resource control from one party to another (Etzioni, 1968), enabling either to reinforce the existing activity patterns or establish new ones in the business landscape (Lundgren, 1992). For example, the success of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) in maintaining its leading position of chip making depends on its capability of mobilizing key companies, including those who provide equipment, chemicals, and other important materials to form an ecosystem that has erected a high competition barrier against Intel and Samsung (Yu & Cheng, 2021).
Mobilization drives the development of the socially constructed world, in the sense that it allows political, societal, and business initiatives and movements to unfold towards a desired end (Bimber, 1998; Gerhards & Rucht, 1992; Iacono & Kling, 2001; Ritvala & Salmi, 2010). Within the domain of business and management, the concept of mobilization has been employed to investigate network change and evolution by highlighting the critical role of inter-organizational relationships that permit the combination of resources and the connection of activities (Chou & Zolkiewski, 2012; Halinen et al., 1999). Extant research also has indicated that innovation, including the free software movement (Elliott & Scacchi, 2008), technological change (Chou, 2016) and service innovation (Goduscheit & Faullant, 2018), can result from boundary-crossing resource mobilization, which is influenced and guided by the mobilizer’s problem-framing and agenda-setting (Möller, 2010; Snow et al., . Additionally, research on mobilization pays attention to organizational change (Canterino et al., 2020) and new ventures (La Rocca & Snehota, 2021).
More research efforts are required to expand the knowledge of mobilization, especially concerning the emergence of value co-creating ecosystems. Ecosystems have appeared as a new form of contemporary organizing (Adner, 2017; Jacobides et al., 2018), which redefines the firm’s sources of strategic advantages, and the consequent survival and prosperity (Iansiti & Levien, 2004). An ecosystem emphasizes collaborations across organizational boundaries, resulting in an interdependent and symbiotic structure that is formed by interactive relationships (Vargo & Lusch, 2011); and thus, is characterized by the co-creation of value (Vargo & Lusch, 2017). The popularity of value co-creating ecosystems can be vividly illustrated by social media platforms such as Facebook and peer-to-peer digital platforms like Uber Eats (Belk, 2014; De Reuver et al., 2018), and Amazon Alexa’s ecosystem (Hoffman & Novak, 2018). Despite the importance of value co-creation underpinning an ecosystem, mobilizing ecosystem participants to contribute their resources in aligned actions remains under-explored.