Ecosystems—communities of interdependent yet hierarchically independent heterogeneous participants who collectively generate an ecosystem value proposition—often emerge through collective action, where ecosystem participants interact with each other and the external environment. When such organizational forms are emerging, they require legitimacy to overcome the “liability of newness.” Adopting a collective action lens and taking a legitimacy-as-process approach, we propose a process model of ecosystem collective action, where an orchestrator, complementors, users, and external actors together drive ecosystem legitimacy. We identify three key legitimation processes—discursive legitimation, performative legitimation, and ecosystem identity construction—and demonstrate how these three processes together facilitate the emergence of ecosystem legitimacy and reduce the liability of newness of emerging ecosystems.

生态系统是相互依存但层次独立的异质参与者共同创造生态系统价值主张的社区，通常是通过集体行动而形成的，其中生态系统参与者相互之间以及与外部环境相互作用。当这种组织形式出现时，它们需要合法性来克服“新颖性的责任”。我们采用集体行动的视角并采用合法性即过程方法，提出了生态系统集体行动的过程模型，其中协调者，补充者，使用者和外部参与者共同推动了生态系统的合法性。我们确定了三个关键的合法化过程-话语合法化，执行性合法化，