Digital business ecosystems: theoretical underpinnings

Since the seminal work of J. Moore in 1996, the Biological Metaphor of the Ecosystem has been attractive for many scholars. This interest has been growth by the current global scenario. The business ecosystem perspective rejects both the concept of region and industry. In the business ecosystem perspective company is viewed not as a member of a single industry but as a part of a business ecosystem that crosses a variety of industries. Business ecosystems base their success on both competition and cooperation. Self-organization and co-evolution are significant phenomena in the development of business ecosystems. The Digital Business Ecosystem concept is defined as the enabling technology for the Business Ecosystem and represent the digital software environment that support development of distributed and adaptive technologies and evolutionary business models for organisations. Nevertheless this theoretical approach requires more insight on some specific open questions. The first question currently open is: what is the effectiveness of the ecosystem metaphor? If the ecosystem metaphor is strongly seductive and suggestive highlighting emerging organizational structures and behaviours, it is not clear if we will be able to extend well known property of natural ecosystem to business environment. A similar result could open new and effective way of analysing and managing new, emerging and existing inter-organizational structures of firms. The second open question is: what evolutionary model can support a business ecosystem perspective? After Nelson and Winter resource based theory about the evolution of the firm many scholars have dealt with evolutionary approaches. Nevertheless in the business ecosystem perspective the evolutionary key question is far from being related to firm selection and is strictly related with the path-dependent histories of co-evolving organizational forms and with the research for what Padgett identify as the emergence of organizational genotype (logic of identity) and the process of creation of organizational phenotype (through interaction with surrounding social networks).