The Ecosystem Frontier: Strategic Paradigms and the Rise of the Post-Colonial African Enterprise

Samia Abdelouafi, Imane Ghazlane, Badr Touzi

Dominant strategic paradigms, from industry positioning to business ecosystems, rest on an implicit assumption: that the markets, intermediaries and complementors a firm needs already exist. This chapter questions that assumption from the vantage point of post-colonial African enterprises, which frequently compete where such institutions are absent or fragmented. Drawing on an integrative review of strategy, institutional and postcolonial management research published between 2015 and 2025, it develops a conceptual framework termed the ecosystem frontier. The chapter makes three moves. First, it shows that existing ecosystem theory treats complementors as given and coordination as the central strategic problem. Second, it proposes a typology crossing the depth of institutional voids with the interdependence of the value proposition, which identifies ecosystem architecture as a distinct strategic mode in which firms must create the partners they later orchestrate. Third, it derives four testable propositions linking institutional voids, orchestration capability, relational legitimacy and regional integration to cross-border scale and resilience. The chapter concludes that African enterprises are not late adopters of ecosystem strategy but a source of theory about its limits, and that ecosystem creation, rather than ecosystem alignment, is the defining strategic challenge at the frontier.