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ABSTRACT Academic Summary Hype often helps emerging technology ecosystems gain early support for their innovative value propositions, but the initial excitement around the technology typically vanishes at some point. This decrease in excitement and support may lead some ecosystems to fail while others are resilient and recover. With little research investigating the post‐hype phase, our understanding of how firms in an emerging technology ecosystem try to recover from the loss of excitement and support remains limited. To overcome this limitation, our study explores the resilience‐seeking process in the ecosystem of xReality (XR) technologies, encompassing augmented, virtual, and mixed reality. Employing an embedded single‐case approach, we examine post‐hype activities of three archetypes of firm actors (core technology providers, complementors, and implementers) through 44 interviews, industry event participation, and archival analysis. Our study reveals three sets of post‐hype activities with which the firms responded to the challenges they faced after the hype bubble had burst: forging new links, restoring confidence, and adjusting tech. It also finds that the three firm archetypes vary in their engagement in these activities. We incorporate the findings into a framework of post‐hype ecosystem resilience seeking and derive future research directions. Managerial Summary Firms from multiple industries develop and apply new technology (like virtual reality or artificial intelligence) to their business models, creating an “ecosystem” of firms that help form a new consumer market. The initial hype generated by new technology helps ecosystems but typically decreases at some point, causing some ecosystems to fail while others recover. Research to date provides little understanding of how firms within these ecosystems try to recover from the loss of excitement and support. To this end, our study explores the ecosystem of xReality (XR) technologies, including augmented, virtual, and mixed reality. We interview 44 key decision makers across three types of firms: core technology providers, developers of complementary goods and services, and implementers that apply new technology to a specific use case. Although these types of firms vary in their approach, our findings indicate three key activities that support ecosystem resilience in the post‐hype period. First, firms reinvigorate stakeholder interest and support by developing unique combinations of new technology and other emerging technologies. Second, firms restore stakeholder trust by focusing on the most transformative uses for new technology. Finally, firms redefine and refresh an ecosystem through advancements and improvements to new technology and the terminology that defines it.
Schweitzer et al. (Sun,) studied this question.