Date of Award

Spring 2026

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Department

Moore School of Business

First Advisor

Sali Li

Abstract

This dissertation builds on an ecosystem perspective to examine how suppliers strategically navigate interdependent relationships to sustain competitiveness in global supply chains. In today’s digitally interconnected and institutionally diverse global economy, suppliers operate within complex ecosystems composed of buyers, other suppliers, complementors, and institutional actors. In such environments, suppliers cannot rely solely on compliance with buyer mandates or transactional efficiency to maintain advantage. Instead, they must strategically position themselves within networks to preserve relationships, specialize innovation, and implement sustainability practices. Although international business and supply chain research increasingly acknowledges interfirm interdependencies, it continues to view supplier behavior primarily through hierarchical models of buyer control. This dissertation advances an ecosystem-based framework that emphasizes alignment, network positioning, and multilateral interactions as central drivers of supplier outcomes. In this dissertation, I develop three interrelated essays using Apple’s ecosystem as the empirical setting. First, I investigate how alliances between suppliers and complementors influence buyer–supplier relationship termination. Moving beyond dyadic explanations of retention, I show that alliances with complementors enhance suppliers’ strategic value within the ecosystem and reduce the likelihood of termination by reinforcing alignment with system-level value creation. Second, I examine how a supplier’s network structure shapes innovation specialization during periods of architectural change. I demonstrate that network closure promotes technological alignment with the buyer, whereas alliances with complementors introduce non-redundant system-level knowledge that weakens path dependence and redirects  supplier innovation trajectories. Third, I conceptualize environmental certification achievement as a process innovation and show that suppliers occupying central positions in the supplier network are more likely to achieve zero-waste certification due to superior access to sustainability-related knowledge and their ability to align with sustainability expectations. This effect is strengthened by absorptive capacity and weakened by institutional distance. Collectively, this dissertation integrates ecosystem thinking into global supply chain research and offers a dynamic, longitudinal account of how alignment within interdependent relationships shapes value creation by examining supplier retention, innovation, and sustainability outcomes.

Rights

© 2026, Kijong Kim

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