Open Access

The rise of ecosystem prominence has provided several definitions of how we understand ecosystems nowadays. In this context, several scholars have considered influencing factors for ecosystem emergence. This paper addresses this consideration and analyzes the salient characteristics of different ecosystem types and their potential persistence since ecosystem founding to improve the understanding of emergence. We applied a three-step approach (1) identifying ecosystem types based on bibliometric analysis, (2) exploring salient characteristics per ecosystem type using qualitative content analysis and (3) deriving founding conditions from the salient characteristics following a conceptual approach. Based on a bibliometric analysis, we identified business/innovation, entrepreneurial and service ecosystems. In a second step, we developed salient characteristics within the themes of structure, power constellation/interdependencies and governance by inductive coding. As we identified a significant difference in alignment structure, we analyzed if alignment structure persists since ecosystem origin and explains why ecosystems differ. We analyzed potential pairings between alignment structure and their respective founding condition for every ecosystem type. With the alignment structures’ persistence, we can better understand why ecosystem types differ.