CEO and Ecosystem Knowledge Management for Firm Performance

The engineering management field is now focusing on the web of strategic alliances of which a firm is situated, termed an ecosystem. Engineers will be required to communicate and exchange knowledge for new ideas, processes, products, etc. throughout their ecosystem for success. Research suggests that ecosystems will supplant traditional industries (i.e. corporate banking, logistics, travel and hospitality, housing, health care, textiles, mutual funds, etc.) and that only 10% of the firms' successfully manage these new forms successfully. As such top management/CEOs will need to find new ways to actively manage this new form of organization. Our research exams how CEOs proactively manage their external ecosystem. Our research explores how CEOs manage their ecosystem in regard to the type communication (strategic versus non-strategic), to the type of event they are discussing (positive versus negative) and finally how the CEO information affects firm performance. We utilize cross-disciplinary research and our resultant sample analyzes 3,798 strategic alliance firms and 6,968 firm year observations. Our results indicate that firms that actively manage firm-centric information shared with the ecosystem of strategic alliance partners positively affect firm performance