How Complementors Deal with Complement Challenges: A Comparative Study of Ports in the Wind Energy Ecosystem

Complementors enhance the value of the ecosystem's core proposition; however, their complement challenges may evolve into bottlenecks, disrupting the entire ecosystem and threatening its health and development. Considering their ecosystem-level effects, complement challenges have been researched mainly from the focal firm's perspective. However, this study considers the complementors’ vantage points to explore their approaches to dealing with complement challenges. We rely on the insights of two ports in Denmark and China, which act as complementors in the offshore wind energy ecosystem. Depending on the complexity of complement challenges and their willingness to comply, complementors rely on several approaches, i.e., compliant collaboration, sub-ecosystem building, alignment pursuance, developing an ecosystem perspective, and position leveraging. Although being collaborative and even building a sub-ecosystem seem natural for port-complementors, other approaches fall outside the normal pattern of complementors’ value-adding role. This study contributes to expanding complementors' views of the management of complement challenges in ecosystems.