Ecosystem visioning: An attention-based view

Research on ecosystem strategy has advanced our understanding of how focal firms orchestrate ecosystems during ecosystem emergence, but less is known about how autonomous participants orient themselves toward a common direction in the first place. Existing studies often treat ecosystem vision as an ex ante blueprint defined by the focal firm, leaving underexplored the question of how a vision becomes collectively meaningful across organizational boundaries. Drawing on the attention-based view (ABV), we conceptualize ecosystem visioning as a recursive process of collective attentional alignment. Based on an abductive multiple-case study of ARM, Alibaba, Xiaomi, and Uber, we identify three attentional mechanisms through which this attentional alignment develops: attentional framing of ecosystem issues and answers, structuring distributed attention across actors, and anchoring collective attention through interdependence. We distinguish them from ecosystem orchestration practices: visioning constitutes the cognitive foundation for ecosystem orchestration, while orchestration practices enact and reinforce these attentional mechanisms, and the resulting interactions generate feedback that informs subsequent visioning. Our study contributes to ecosystem strategy by revealing the attentional dynamics underlying ecosystem emergence, extends strategic vision research from a focal-firm representation to an interorganizational process, and advances the ABV from attention allocation within organizations to attentional alignment across autonomous actors.