When deep technologies with transformative potential emerge, organizations face a distinctive strategic problem: they must attract ecosystem partners who do not yet recognize the technology’s relevance to them, commit to designs whose consequences are unknowable, and allocate resources across competing trajectories without reliable signals of which will prevail. New ventures face additional challenges — navigating hype (surges of expectations, attention, and excitement) to build legitimacy for innovations whose value cannot yet be demonstrated, all while managing long time horizons and substantial resource dependence. Current theory addresses pieces of this puzzle but assumes organizations can identify partners, foresee implications, and forecast trajectories. These assumptions collapse during emergence.

This project develops an integrated research program examining how ecosystem discovery, architectural competition, resource allocation, and efforts at legitimation interact during technology emergence. It investigates these four interconnected dynamics using a combination of historical analysis, quantitative analysis, simulation, and real-time ethnography. First, ecosystem discovery: how organizations signal to attract unknown partners. Second, architectural competition: how timing of commitments shapes whether markets coexist or converge. Third, resource allocation: how early design decisions enable or foreclose pathways. Fourth, legitimation: how new ventures navigate hype to build credibility and networks. Empirical contexts include historical technology battles, Munich’s robotics and AI ecosystem, contemporary platform competition, and the TUM Hyperloop.

These questions advance TransforM’s focus on opportunity recognition and organizational design under uncertainty, with deep engagement in Munich’s innovation ecosystem.