Abstract
Academic Summary: Hype often helps emerging technology ecosystems gain early support for their innovative value proposi-tions, but the initial excitement around the technology typically vanishes at some point. This decrease in excitement and supportmay 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 supportremains 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 examinepost-hype activities of three archetypes of firm actors (core technology providers, complementors, and implementers) through 44interviews, industry event participation, and archival analysis. Our study reveals three sets of post-hype activities with which thefirms responded to the challenges they faced after the hype bubble had burst: forging new links, restoring confidence, and ad-justing tech. It also finds that the three firm archetypes vary in their engagement in these activities. We incorporate the findingsinto 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 artificialintelligence) to their business models, creating an “ecosystem” of firms that help form a new consumer market. The initial hypegenerated by new technology helps ecosystems but typically decreases at some point, causing some ecosystems to fail while oth-ers recover. Research to date provides little understanding of how firms within these ecosystems try to recover from the loss ofexcitement and support. To this end, our study explores the ecosystem of xReality (XR) technologies, including augmented, vir-tual, and mixed reality. We interview 44 key decision makers across three types of firms: core technology providers, developersof complementary goods and services, and implementers that apply new technology to a specific use case. Although these typesof firms vary in their approach, our findings indicate three key activities that support ecosystem resilience in the post-hype pe-riod. First, firms reinvigorate stakeholder interest and support by developing unique combinations of new technology and otheremerging 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 terminol-ogy that defines it.