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

doi:10.1016/J.IJINFOMGT.2019.01.002

Journal Article•DOI•

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

Prince Kwame Senyo¹, Kecheng Liu¹, John Effah²•Institutions (2)

University of Reading¹, University of Ghana²

01 Aug 2019-International Journal of Information Management (Elsevier Limited)-Vol. 47, pp 52-64

TL;DR: This paper systematically analysed 101 research articles on DBE and develops a comprehensive framework that synthesises and provides an overall direction of DBE research, pointing out gaps in DBE literature and providing future research directions.

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About: This article is published in International Journal of Information Management.The article was published on 2019-08-01 and is currently open access. It has received 186 citations till now.

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Summary (4 min read)

Jump to: [1 Introduction] – [2 Overview of Digital Business Ecosystem] – [3 Methods] – [3.1 Definition of literature inclusion/exclusion criteria] – [3.2 Literature search] – [3.3 Literature refinement] – [3.4 Analysis of selected literature] – [4.1 Overview of DBE research] – [4.2 Themes in DBE research] – [4.3 Nature of methodologies and methods used in DBE research] – [4.4 Nature of theories used in DBE research] – [5 Framework for DBE research] – [5.1 Gaps in DBE research themes for future studies] – [5.2 The role of methodology and method] – [5.3 The role of theory] and [6 Conclusion]

1 Introduction

The advancement of digital technology has led to the development of new collaborative organisational networks such as digital business ecosystem (DBE).
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.
To address these research questions, the rest of this paper is organised as follows.
Next, the authors discuss their research method in terms of journal selection, literature search, article selection, refinement and analysis approaches.

2 Overview of Digital Business Ecosystem

DBE is an extension of Moore’s (1993) business ecosystem for which digital technology plays a dominant role.
Business ecosystem is an economic community of loosely-coupled interacting organisations and individuals who produce valuable goods and services (Moore, 1993).
Value co-creation involves efforts and resources from different entities towards value creation (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004).
Finally, DBE is a class of collaborative networks with a wider alliance of heterogenous and geographically dispersed entities that collaborate via the Internet to achieve common outcomes (Camarinha-Matos & Afsarmanesh, 2008).
Collaborative networks consist of two main categories of relationships, namely organised and ad-hoc collaborations (Graça & Camarinha-Matos, 2017).

3 Methods

Following, Senyo, Addae and Boateng (2018), the authors used systematic literature review and combined it with Wolfswinkel et al.’s (2013) grounded theory literature review method.
While systematic literature review offers a pre-defined procedure for literature search and refinement, the grounded theory literature review method ensures extraction of linkages between different papers.
The two approaches were chosen to achieve a holistic literature coverage, adequate extraction of meanings and associations between studies as well as thorough analysis.
In line with these approaches, the authors followed a five-stage systematic review process : (1) definition of literature inclusion and exclusion criteria, (2) literature search, (3) literature refinement, (4) analysis of selected articles and (5) presentation of findings.
The discussions below elaborate on each of these stages and their sub components.

3.1 Definition of literature inclusion/exclusion criteria

As such, their literature inclusion criteria were targeted at papers from high-quality sources.
The authors agree with Webster and Watson (2002) that highquality contributions in a field are predominantly found in reputable sources such as academic journals and conferences.
Therefore, the authors included only peer-reviewed journal and conference articles and excluded dissertations, books reviews, case studies and books.
The authors defined their search terms as “digital business ecosystem”, “DBE”, “digital ecosystem”, “business ecosystem” and “collaborative network” to capture both DBE and related articles.

3.2 Literature search

To ensure a complete coverage, the authors started the literature search from 12 major databases, namely ABI/INFORM, ACM Digital Library, AISeL, Emerald journals, IEEE Xplore Digital Library, EBSCOhost, SAGE, Science Direct, Scopus, Springer Link, Web of Science and Wiley Online Library.
The authors chose these databases because they cover a significant range of IS journals and conference publications (Webster & Watson, 2002).
Using the defined terms, the authors conducted the search on the titles, keywords and abstracts.
Finally, the authors conducted forward and backward searches to ensure a holistic coverage of the articles sampled.
In the end, a total of 303 peer-reviewed journal and conference articles were collated for further refinement and analysis.

3.3 Literature refinement

Given that the articles sampled included duplicates and studies on related DBE concepts, the authors conducted further refinement.
At this stage, the authors carefully filtered the sampled articles for duplicates and discarded those that did not meet the inclusion criteria.
The authors performed the literature refinement process by reading the title, abstract and the main text of the sampled articles.
After manually refining the sampled literature, a total of 101 journal and conference articles were selected for analysis in this review.

3.4 Analysis of selected literature

Next, the authors analysed conceptual similarities of the open codes to generate axial codes.
With regards to analysis on theory and research methodology, the authors coded the selected articles based on their underpinning theoretical lens and methodologies.
A master classification table was developed in Microsoft Word for excerpts, notes and categories from each article.

4.1 Overview of DBE research

This subsection presents the distribution of publications by journal and conference sources as well as yearly trends.
In terms of conference publications, the International Conference on Digital Ecosystems and Technologies had the highest representation of 37.62%, followed by the PRO-VE conference with 11.88%.
The International Conference on Management of Digital EcoSystems had 4.95% while the International Conference on Information Systems had 3.96%.
From this result, it is evident that there are limited journal publications on DBE research while the majority of the articles are conference papers.

4.2 Themes in DBE research

This subsection addresses the study’s research question 1 (RQ1).
Specifically, these articles examine how DBEs generate business value for participants.
Though existing platform design studies contribute critical insights, there are still outstanding issues such as platform development strategies, business and technical considerations as well as sustainability elements.
The DBE development and management sub-theme includes studies (e.g., Lurgi and Estanyol, 2010; Raza et al., 2009) that examine the formation, life cycle as well as evolution of DBEs.
Similarly, articles on DBE frameworks present approaches that explain the underlying structure of issues in DBE.

4.3 Nature of methodologies and methods used in DBE research

This subsection presents findings on methodologies and methods used in DBE research.
The authors adapted Alavi and Carlson’s (1992) research strategy classification framework during this analysis since it has extensive coverage of research methodologies and methods.
The findings show that a large number of DBE research are conceptual in nature and therefore non-empirical (50.50%).
In terms of empirical studies, the simulation (19.80%) and case study (19.80%) methods are the widely used approaches under the qualitative and the quantitative methodologies.
In fact, most qualitative studies (e.g., Selander et al., 2010; Tan et al., 2009) have called for quantitative testing of their propositions.

4.4 Nature of theories used in DBE research

This subsection addresses research question 3 (RQ3) of this paper.
With respect to theory, the authors examined the sampled papers to identify their theoretical underpinnings.
As such, the authors classified such articles under the “no theory” category.
Among the articles that used theories, the Network theory recorded the highest usage of 3.96%, followed by the Zachman framework (1.98%), the Evolution (1.98%) and the Social network theory (1.98%).
Even though DBE is relatively new, it is still important for researchers to make the effort to build theories for significant contributions to the development of the research area.

5 Framework for DBE research

This section presents their proposed framework to address research question 4 (RQ4).
Moreover, this framework is a useful starting point for new researchers and practitioners to understand the current state of DBE research and identify areas that require further studies.
The research theme component details the main issues in prior DBE studies.

5.1 Gaps in DBE research themes for future studies

The extant DBE research has generally been investigated from relationships and network analysis perspectives.
There are some aspects of DBE platforms that require further research.
As a result, there are interoperability issues.
While the authors argue for the development of DBE specific artefacts, it is also prudent to highlight the need for their empirical validation.

5.2 The role of methodology and method

The findings from their analysis show that DBE research is dominated by conceptual oriented papers.
In most cases, studies that used quantitative and qualitative methodologies rely on simulation and case study methods.
As presented in their framework in Figure 3, there is a need to conduct DBE research in other contexts since most existing studies have predominately been in the United Kingdom, Finland and Italy (e.g., Baggio and Del Chiappa, 2014; Korpela et al., 2017; Tsatsou et al., 2010; Whitley and Darking, 2006).

5.3 The role of theory

From their framework, there is a need for theorisation in DBE research as majority of existing studies have not utilised mainstream theories, models or frameworks except for a few (e.g., Darking & Whitley, 2007; Koch & Windsperger, 2017; Selander et al., 2010; Tan et al., 2016; Whitley & Darking, 2006).
DBE embraces participation of multiple organisations from different industries; on the contrary, some theories focus on organisations in a single industry.
Thus, the use of these theories may be problematic in DBE research because of philosophical misalignment (Whetten, Felin, & King, 2009).
Furthermore, theory borrowing affects the maturity of research areas.
Thus, for the DBE field to grow into a well-established research area, there is a need for theory building efforts (Tan et al., 2016).

6 Conclusion

From these main themes, the business issues dominated the others.
While the decreasing DBE research trend is worrying, it also presents a unique opportunity for some journals to take a leadership role and become pacesetters for others as DBE continues to gain increasing popularity in practice.
Third, the use of grounded theory literature review method in this study moves their review a step further from some existing ones to enable a holistic literature coverage and thorough analysis for advancing knowledge.

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