Dual-Platform Enablement and Triple-Chain Leapfrog Growth: A Configurational Study of Autonomous Driving Complementors in China

Existing accounts of platform-mediated complementor growth rest on two limiting assumptions: that platform enablement constitutes a homogeneous environmental input and that firm growth is a unitary outcome. This double simplification obscures how distinct platform provisions generate qualitatively different forms of firm transformation. This study asks which combinations of mechanistically distinct platform enablement types and internal strategic response capabilities activate which forms of leapfrog growth among complementor firms operating under dual institutional governance. We employ fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) on survey data from 374 complementor firms in China’s autonomous driving platform ecosystem. Five antecedent conditions are examined across two dimensions: platform enablement, comprising rule-based enablement (RE) and business platform enablement (BPE); and strategic response capabilities, comprising network linkage capability (NLC), organizational ambidexterity (OA), and policy responsiveness (PR). Three outcome variables capture three non-reducible leapfrog dimensions: technology-chain (TL), value-chain (VL), and institutional-chain (IL) transitions. A reverse-causality robustness check and a common-method-bias assessment corroborate the validity of findings. The analysis identifies equifinal configurational pathways with distinct dominant logics across the three chains. Technology-chain transitions are predominantly network-linkage-driven; value-chain transitions are policy-responsiveness-anchored; institutional-chain transitions exhibit genuine equifinality between network-linkage and policy-responsiveness pathways, both requiring dual-platform enablement as a universal structural precondition. No single enabling condition or capability suffices; leapfrog growth is irreducibly configurational and causally asymmetric. The study offers a dual-enablement, three-chain configurational framework for understanding platform-mediated firm growth under dual institutional governance. For complementor firms, findings support dimension-selective capability investment over uniform accumulation strategies. For platform orchestrators, differentiated governance design calibrated to specific complementor upgrading trajectories outperforms homogeneous resource provisioning. For policymakers, institutionalized consultative channels linking private platform governance with public regulatory processes are recommended to facilitate coordinated digital industrial transformation.