Collaboration and Innovation Dynamics in Software Ecosystems: A Technology Management Research Perspective

Abstract

In a widely used definition, a software ecosystem (SECO) is a "collection of software projects which are developed and evolve together in the same environment." The objective of this article is to explore how SECOs foster collaboration among their key players to achieve innovation within individual software projects. Thus, in this article, we merge two prevalent views from past research, namely, the organization and the project-centric views on innovation management into a concept map. We then describe how these views complement each other. The resulting concept map contains new concepts that provide better coverage of how innovation currently takes place within ecosystems and shows how internal and external drivers are key to the innovation in SECOs. With this article, we want to open the floor to further discussion on how internal and external drivers can be effective in propelling innovation of both traditional (closed) and open-source SECOs. We solicit future work to expand on this view and to achieve a more complete understanding of how SECOs are connected to innovation.

Guest Editorial: Collaboration and Innovation Dynamics in Software Ecosystems

“…We now revisit our previous map in Fig. 1 from [2] to see which concepts were covered by the abovementioned articles in our Special Section. The concepts used are in boldface, and next to the concepts, we see the article numbers (based on the abovementioned list numbers) that incorporated the concepts in their research.…”

“…In our previous article [2], we proposed the following concept map (see Fig. 1) for collaboration and innovation in the field of software ecosystems, where we use the following notations.…”

“…Fig.1. Face of innovation: Concept map depicting how software ecosystems can bring about innovation (based on[2]). We have added numbers representing the papers accepted in the Special Issue, where the numbers 1-5 represent the articles [A1],[A2],[A3],[A4], and[A5], respectively, in that order.…”

On Autonomous Dynamic Software Ecosystems

“…In order to make this collaborative aspects more dynamic we need to count with a reliable trust model where the automation engaging partners and data exchange is maximized on the basis on a reliable confidence between the DECO stakeholders. As stated in [53], the collaboration and innovation dynamics will play a key role for DECO players and processes that change often and provide the ability of the DECO constituents to support new collaborative models. Furthermore, part of the competition between similar ecosystems will come from the success of DECOs to provide newer collaborative models that makes ecosystem management more efficient and agile.…”

Towards Using Package Centrality Trend to Identify Packages in Decline

“…Our prototype extension helps developers be informed about the scentrality trend when they browse a package on the official npm website. 8 We build the tool as a Chrome Extension. Users can activate our extension in their Chrome browser.…”