Digital business ecosystem: Literature review and a framework for future research

Abstract

Digital innovation has radically changed how organisations collaborate and compete. Coupled with this change are new collaborative value creation networks such as digital business ecosystems (DBEs). DBE is a socio-technical network of individuals, organisations and technologies that collectively co-create value. Since the emergence of DBE over a decade ago, there have been limited attempts to critically review and synthesise the body of knowledge presented over the years. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to fill this gap in DBE research by: (1) developing a comprehensive framework that synthesises and provides an overall direction of DBE research; (2) pointing out gaps in DBE literature; and (3) providing future research directions. To address this purpose, we systematically analysed 101 research articles on DBE. The findings provide insightful revelations to address some limitations in the current DBE research. As such, this study makes important contributions and serves as a useful resource for future DBE studies and practice.

Conceptualising Capabilities and Value Co-Creation in a Digital Business Ecosystem (DBE): A Systematic Literature Review

“…DBE research gains popularity in various fields such as information systems, computer science, tourism and general management (Senyo, Liu, & Effah, 2019). Hence, we selected GoogleScholar as the key database for performing the search.…”

“…Hence, business organisations need to understand and examine their existing capabilities, such as digital skills before establishing or joining a DBE (InnovateUK, 2015;TechCity, 2017). Although there is previous DBE research conducted such as Senyo, Liu and Effah (2019), there is a lack of literature in identifying organisations' capabilities before embarking on a DBE journey (Battistella et al, 2013;Molla et al, 2008). Therefore, this paper aims to conceptualise capabilities and value co-creation in DBE by conducting a systematic review study.…”

Understanding Ecosystem Data

“…2 Next, I identified all prior work on ecosystems and reviewed each study for the type of data used by the authors. To do so, I leveraged existing literature reviews and meta analysis (e.g., [9,20,21,22]) and used a forward/backward snowballing method to identify relevant studies.…”

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“…The literature in the subject of digital ecosystems is sparse, with varied areas of focus. Indeed, in recent research Senyo, et. al (2019) map out the research landscape within the topic of digital business ecosystems.…”