Digital Futures and Cultivating Imagined Ecosystems: The Rise and Fall of the First Digital Pill Venture

Existing literature has primarily focused on how established firms engage in orchestration through deliberate, purposeful actions to promote existing digital innovation ecosystems. However, many such digital innovation ecosystems start as digital ventures aspiring to build ecosystems around their digital product innovations. Less is known about how these ventures initiate and engage in ecosystem dynamics before established ecosystem structures are in place. In this study, we address this shortcoming by examining how a digital venture enacts a digital innovation ecosystem de novo. To do so, we conducted a three-year inductive field study of an ingestible biosensor venture that sought to develop a platform-enabled ecosystem around the first digital pill. Our findings suggest that digital venturing unfolds within temporal tensions that create dissonance between digitization and digitalization. We develop the concept of cultivating an imagined ecosystem, which comprises three core mechanisms, namely entrepreneurial trajectory dynamics, digital future-making, and sociotechnical enactment. Our findings highlight three cultivation practices—perceptive response to emergent futures, prefigurative action in relation to desired distant futures, and inattentive inaction to alternative futures that become consequential in enacting an ecosystem de novo. Finally, we present a model of cultivating an imagined ecosystem, which offers a future-oriented perspective of the mutually reinforcing dynamics of the social and the technical in digital venturing.