Guest editorial: Deconstructing business ecosystems: complementarity, capabilities, co-creation and co-evolution
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/IMDS-09-2022-811 |
| Published date | 12 October 2022 |
| Date | 12 October 2022 |
| Pages | 1977-1986 |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Information systems,Data management systems,Knowledge management,Knowledge sharing,Management science & operations,Supply chain management,Supply chain information systems,Logistics,Quality management/systems |
| Author | Yongyi Shou,Yongjiang Shi,Guang-Jie Ren |
Guest editorial: Deconstructing
business ecosystems:
complementarity, capabilities,
co-creation and co-evolution
1. Introduction
In the recent decade, there is a substantially increasing amount of studies on business
ecosystems (Adner, 2017). The term “ecosystem”is borrowed from natural ecology (Moore,
1993) and now is not only widely adopted by high-tech and Internet firms (Benitez et al., 2020;
Leong et al., 2016) but also by more established sectors from manufacturing to financial
services (Rong et al., 2020;Vink et al., 2021). Scholars have made efforts to understand what
ecosystems are, why they emerge and how they differ from other business organizations (Hou
and Shi, 2021;Jacobides et al., 2018;Kretschmer et al., 2022;Moore, 2006).
It is advocated that business ecosystems should be recognized as the third organizational
form which is different to markets and hierarchies (Moore, 2006). More specifically, business
ecosystems have unique interorganizational relationships and arrangements compared to
traditional markets (Williamson, 1979), vertically integrated supply chains (Cao and Zhang,
2011;Flynn et al., 2010;Shou et al., 2018) or geographically dispersed manufacturing
networks (Shi and Gregory, 1998;Zhang and Gregory, 2011). Business ecosystems are more
than just transactional relationships; they create the underlying infrastructure, human
capital and other resources that are often shared or rotated across ecosystem actors. In short,
it should be regarded as a new type of collective form for multiple, heterogeneous
stakeholders (Cennamo and Santal
o, 2019).
The fast development of business ecosystems is facilitated by emerging digital technologies,
which help overcome difficulties in communication and transactions across organizational
boundaries and geographic dispersion. A number of studi esh ave touched upon the roles of such
technologies in shaping the contexts of business ecosystems, including 3D printing (Rong et al.,
2020), big data (H€
anninen et al., 2018), blockchain(Saadatmand et al., 2019), Industry 4.0 (Benitez
et al., 2020) and Internet-of-Things (Rong et al., 2015). Nevertheless, further examination of many
emerging technologies from a business ecosystem per spective, especially their respective roles
in business ecosystems, is needed. Such emerging technologies include artificial intelligence
(Wirtzet al.,2022), autonomousvehicle (Alochetet al., 2021), cloud computing (Shou et al.,2020),
digital twin (Parmar et al.,2020)andsmarthome(Kim et al.,2019), to name a few .Parti cularly,
COVID-19 has significantly accelerated the implementation and adoption of digital technologies,
thereby reshaping traditional industries and creating nascent business ecosystems.
Given the fast development of business ecosystems in practice, it is timely and meaningful
to investigate the various aspects of business ecosystem to advance our knowledge on this
progressive phenomenon. This special issue offers a number of studies that address
interesting topics in a variety of ecosystems using different research methods.
2. Four aspects of ecosystems
With the surge of research on business ecosystems, there are a number of high quality
reviews on this topic (e.g. Gomes et al., 2018;Ranjan and Read, 2021;Vink et al., 2021).
Guest editorial
1977
Industrial Management & Data
Systems
Vol. 122 No. 9, 2022
pp. 1977-1986
© Emerald Publishing Limited
0263-5577
DOI 10.1108/IMDS-09-2022-811
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