The ongoing energy transition requires materializing new and complex value propositions, through processes driven jointly by a variety of actors who form ecosystems that mobilise and coordinate existing and novel resources. Because these ecosystems are resource intensive and face a high risk of technological lock-in, they face great governance challenges. Our conceptual development finds three underlying tensions specific to the case of asset intensive ecosystems: collective-individual, value capture-value appropriation and efficiency-flexibility. Through a longitudinal case study of a hydrogen mobility ecosystem, our research identifies strategies aimed at balancing these tensions and how these strategies differ from the more widely studied digital ecosystems. Our main result is that because in these ecosystems the number of potential actors is limited, negotiation happens individually and not at a group level. Moreover, depending on the level of the substitutability of aspiring members, the strategies put in place by the ecosystem to ensure their adhesion differ.
