Big gains in digital ecosystem niches: How facilitators emerge and develop into an organizational category

The digital entrepreneurial ecosystem is a complex and dynamic network of entrepreneurs, businesses, institutions, and systems that use digital technology to interact with one another. It is conducive to the creation, development, and sustainment of innovation in digital ventures. However, the building blocks of any digital entrepreneurial ecosystem remain loosely integrated and under-orchestrated in the early stages of its evolution. The entrepreneurial organizations that act as matchmakers and transaction catalysts have thus come to play significant roles in digital entrepreneurial ecosystems’ functioning, but the understanding of these roles remains relatively limited. Through an in-depth qualitative study of the organizational category observed within multi-channel network (MCN) organizations, a new type of intermediary role was identified and conceptualized as that of a facilitator in live streaming e-commerce, a new role in the digital entrepreneurial ecosystem. The findings suggest that the category emergence of facilitators is based on resource orchestration in the dimensions of people, goods, and scenes, enabled by three primary mechanisms: “novelty perception” (for category awareness), “exemplar projection” (for category scalability), and “structure shaping” (for category recognizability). The theoretical framework developed through this research contributes to the emergence of a new organizational category in the context of the digital economy, as well as offering practical guidance for the category strategy for venture growth in the digital entrepreneurial ecosystem.