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

Highlights

• Digital innovation has enabled the development of new collaborative networks such as digital business ecosystems.

• There have been limited attempts to critically review and synthesise digital business ecosystem research.

• This study systematically analysed and critically reviewed 101 research articles on digital business ecosystem.

• This study combined systematic literature review approach with grounded theory literature review method as the overall research strategy.

• The findings suggest that digital business ecosystem research can be classified into four main themes.

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.

Introduction

The advancement of digital technology has led to the development of new collaborative organisational networks such as digital business ecosystem (DBE). DBE is a collaborative environment made up of different entities that co-create value through information and communication technologies (ICTs) (Nachira, Dini, & Nicolai, 2007). DBE transcends traditional industry boundaries to foster open and flexible collaboration and competition. For many organisations, DBE presents an innovative approach to leverage resources such as technology and specialised services across different industries to respond to customer needs.

Since its conceptualisation from a European Union (EU) project (Whitley & Darking, 2006), DBE has gained popularity in many disciplines such as information systems (IS) (e.g., Graça & Camarinha-Matos, 2017; Senyo, Liu, Sun, & Effah, 2016; Tsatsou, Elaluf-calderwood, & Liebenau, 2010), general management (e.g., Koch & Windsperger, 2017), tourism (e.g., Del Chiappa & Baggio, 2015) and computer science (e.g., Hussain, Chang, Hussain, & Dillon, 2007a). In practice, DBE has also gained increasing attention (Gartner, 2015) as organisations strive to leverage external resources to meet growing customer needs. Therefore, to push DBE research forward, it is important to review the extant studies to unearth: (1) extensively researched issues, (2) less-researched areas, (3) methods and theories used in prior research, as well as (4) issues for future studies.

In the extant IS literature, limited attempts have been made to systematically review DBE studies. Thus, we argue that a thorough review of existing literature on DBE will: (1) enable proper evaluation to determine the extent of studies already undertaken and offer gaps for future studies; and (2) support better understanding of the DBE concept and stimulate future research. Therefore, this study seeks to provide a critical review of DBE research by synthesising existing studies and developing a framework that highlights issues, methodologies and methods as well as theories in prior investigations. The main research questions motivating this study are:

RQ1: What themes have been investigated in prior DBE research?

RQ2: What methodologies and methods have been utilised in the extant DBE research?

RQ3: What theories, models and frameworks have informed prior DBE research?

RQ4: What gaps exist in current DBE research that future studies can investigate?

To address these research questions, the rest of this paper is organised as follows. First, we present an overview of the DBE concept. Next, we discuss our research method in terms of journal selection, literature search, article selection, refinement and analysis approaches. Thereafter, we present the findings to address our research questions. This is followed by presentation of our proposed DBE research framework, which we consider useful for future research and practice. Finally, we conclude the paper with a discussion of our research contributions.