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This paper aims to explore the dimensions that foster the accomplishment of goals of business ecosystems.

The paper reviews recent contributions to business ecosystems and identifies the key pillars that support the achievement of good results.

The paper suggests that entanglement with the customers, value sharing based on a holistic win-win approach, organizational entrepreneurship alignment and continuous smart learning are four dimensions of criticality for designing an effective business ecosystem. These four dimensions nurture the relationships between participants and external actors to make ecosystems successful. Entanglement with the customer is critical to the long-term relevance of the value proposition that reinforces companies’ relationships within the second pillar of value sharing in a win-win system. The development is structured in an organizational alignment where entrepreneurship is the engine, from the employees themselves to the largest corporations, and is enriched with continuous learning based on the exploitation of knowledge and big data.

The paper identifies a set of four pillars of business ecosystem design for further empirical analysis by ecosystem researchers.

The paper provides managers and professionals with strategies to develop effective growth within business ecosystems.

The authors contribute a fresh perspective to the business ecosystems literature by identifying four key pillars of success in the current business landscape.

Business Model Innovation is increasingly created by an ecosystem of related companies. This paper aims to investigate the transition of a manufacturing ecosystem toward electric vehicles from a business model perspective.

The authors investigate an automotive manufacturing ecosystem that is in transition toward electric and electrified vehicles, conducting semi-structured interviews with 46 informants from 27 ecosystem members.

The results reveal that the actions of several ecosystem members are driven by regulations relating to emissions. Novel requirements regarding components and complementary offers necessitate the entry of actors from other industries and the formation of new ecosystem members. While the newly emerged ecosystem has roots in an established ecosystem, it relies on new value offers. Further, the findings highlight the importance of ecosystem governance, while the necessary degree of change in the members' business models depends on their roles and positions in the ecosystem. Therefore, upstream suppliers of components must perform business model adaptation, whereas downstream providers must perform more complex business model innovation.

The paper is among the first to investigate an entire manufacturing ecosystem and analyze its transition toward electric vehicles and the implications for business model innovation.

This study explores the influence of the Top Management Team (TMT) social capital on business model innovation in business ecosystems.

This study examines the impact of internal and external TMT social capital on enterprises’ business model innovation, explores the relationship between internal and external TMT social capital, and investigates how business ecosystem health moderates the relationship between external TMT social capital and enterprises’ business model innovation. These hypotheses are proposed and tested using a hierarchical regression analysis with data from 168 Chinese firms.

First, both internal and external TMT social capital exert a significantly positive influence on an enterprise’s business model innovation. Second, internal TMT social capital positively contributes to the development of external TMT social capital, affecting business model innovation. Finally, the moderating effect of business ecosystem health on the relationship between external TMT social capital and business model innovation depends on the dimensions. Specifically, the productivity of the business ecosystem negatively moderates this relationship, whereas the niche creation capability of the business ecosystem has a positive moderating effect.

These findings enrich prior research on business model innovation within the business ecosystem, thoroughly exploring the critical role of TMT social capital. This study reveals the diverse impacts of internal and external TMT social capital on business model innovation and the intricate relationship between these elements. Furthermore, it emphasizes that the success of enterprise’s business model innovation within a business ecosystem depends on the alignment and adaptation to dynamic ecosystem conditions. By presenting these insights, this study provides valuable practical implications for enterprises aiming to cultivate social capital within business ecosystem to facilitate business model innovation.

Platform, open/user innovation, and ecosystem strategies embrace and enable interactions with external entities. Firms pursuing these approaches conduct business and interact with environments differently than those pursuing traditional closed strategies. This chapter considers these strategies together highlighting similarities and differences between platform, open/user innovation, and ecosystem strategies. We focus on managerial and organizational challenges for organizations pursuing these strategies and identify four institutional logic shifts associated with these strategic transitions: (1) increasing external focus, (2) moving to greater openness, (3) focusing on enabling interactions, and (4) adopting interaction-centric metrics. As mature incumbent organizations adopt these strategies, there may be tensions and multiple conflicting institutional logics. Additionally, we consider four strategic leadership topics and how they relate to platform, open/user innovation, and ecosystem strategies: (1) executive orientation and experience, (2) top management teams, (3) board-management relations, and (4) executive compensation. We discuss theoretical implications, and consider future directions and research opportunities.

Despite the constantly increasing number of publications in the field of business ecosystems, there are indications that a precise definition that appropriately captures the business ecosystem mindset is not yet available. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to provide a consensus definition of business ecosystems.

Using structured content analysis, this paper examines a total of 43 definitions in terms of their core components.

The results indicate that the existing definitions focus only on single components, e.g. “network of actors,” thereby omitting other essential components, such as “cocreated value proposition” or “shared fate.” Consequently, it seems appropriate to develop a consensus definition that combines the perspectives of the academic and practitioner communities.

The proposed definition is more comprehensive than the prevailing definitions and represents a synthesis of previous considerations on business ecosystems. Such a definition will support researchers in developing a sound business ecosystem theory that will guide practitioners in the efficient design and management of business ecosystems in the long term.

In the African context, the threat of the disruption of traditional business value-creation processes, currently facilitated by the growing information technology (IT) ecosystem, came with the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Thus, this paper aims to investigate the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on interfirm relationships within the context of the digital ecosystem in Africa.

This study employs an explanatory–exploratory qualitative approach from an interpretivist stance to investigate the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on interfirm relationships. The authors conducted seven in-depth interviews with top management executives in a Nigerian technology company, together with the company's archival data that provided the pre, during and post pandemic (2018–2021) business-to-business (B2B) relationship structures, to determine how these relationships have been affected.

The results suggest that the pandemic had a minimal effect on partnership relationships in the B2B ecosystems of the case company but affected only non-partnership relationships.

The authors' qualitative study is interpretive and the sample size is limited. Hence, there is a need for caution in generalizing the findings. The framework can be further validated across a wider population.

Partnerships can help organizations weather business crises. Consequently, organizations should maintain a healthy number of partnership relations to deal with periods in which challenges emerge in the business landscape. In other words, with tight contracts and a strategic focus on goals and objectives, partnership relations can help organizations weather business crises.

This study builds upon the burgeoning body of literature on digital ecosystems within the African context, which is a relevant contextual contribution.

Business accelerators have recently received increasing attention as important cogs in business ecosystem development. However, their exact role in the ecosystem is not yet well known, especially outside the IT sector. The purpose of this study is, therefore, twofold: to determine the position of life science accelerators in the business ecosystem and the attributes of support for companies and to identify key features of the life science accelerators that contribute to the change in business ecosystems.

The authors offer an exploratory case study of five life science business accelerators and analyze the main factors affecting the companies and the whole business ecosystem. The authors build upon the scarce literature on business accelerators and consider a new type of accelerator that specializes in life science projects and study its role in the transformation and evolution of the life science industry.

The authors have defined the role and key parameters of life science accelerators that influence the existing business ecosystems: (1) cooperation with other regions and countries, (2) development of entrepreneurial skills among participants of the business accelerators program and (3) a project on demand-based approach.

The key parameters of the life science accelerators allow to concentrate these efforts on the activities that are most demanded by the market. Business accelerators can increase the created value for other program participants.

In the contemporary business environment, companies must constantly consider methods to enhance their competitive advantage and create value for their customers. The purpose of this paper is to develop a research model based on a business ecosystem view. Within a business ecosystem, the authors identified the key factors of co-development and the manner in which these factors affect a company’s innovation performance.

The theoretical hypotheses are confirmed by partial least squares analysis of survey responses collected from information and communication technology (ICT) and hotel industries in Taiwan.

In both industries, the results suggest that a firm’s co-development within its own ecosystem has positive effects on innovation performance. For companies in the ICT industry, collaborative networks and partner selection have significant impacts on the firms’ co-development, but their information technology (IT) capability does not; in contrast, in the hotel industry, partner selection and IT capability have significant impacts on firm co-development, but their collaborative network does not.

This study contributes to the literature of business ecosystem and co-development by offering a co-development model. As both conceptual and empirical research on this topic is still underdeveloped, this study provides fresh insights into collaboration management and offers significant theoretical and managerial implications from a business ecosystem perspective.

The purpose of this study is to identify and discuss the role of intelligent materials in the emergence of new business models based on the Internet of Things (IoT). The study suggests new areas for further research to better understand the influences of material intelligence on the business models in industry-wide service ecosystems.

The study uses data from an earlier study of intelligent materials in the steel industry networks. The insights are based on 34 qualitative interviews among 15 organizations in the industry. The data are reanalyzed for this study.

The observations from the steel industry show how material intelligence can be harnessed for value creation in IoT-based business ecosystems. The results suggest that not all “things” connected to the IoT need to be intelligent, if information related to the things are collected, stored and shared for collaborative value creation among the actors involved in the business ecosystem.

The study discusses how IoT deployments allow businesses to benefit from the velocity and variety of information associated with things and guides future research to study the ways in which value is created through IoT-enabled business models.

Rather than focusing on improving the efficiency of the supply network, the study presents new paths for competitive advantages in the new IoT ecosystems.

The study contributes to the mounting research on the IoT by identifying and discussing the critical aspects of how IoT can transform business models and supply networks within end-to-end ecosystems.

The sharing of knowledge between partners in collaborative relationships is widely accepted to be fundamental to supporting strategic decision making, particularly in relation to innovation management and business sustainability. The purpose of this paper is to focus on how the structure of collaborative relationships in business networks may determine successful knowledge sharing and thus improve decision making and business performance.

Expert interviews were conducted with participants operating in networks and business ecosystem in four different sectors in Italy and Germany, exploring the process of knowledge sharing, organisational learning and decision making within collaborative relationships. A qualitative textual analysis was used to analyse the experts’ responses.

The research found that an organisation’s network position and the network structure, as well as the governance and richness of the business ecosystem in which it operates, influence its ability to share knowledge, to innovate and therefore to compete sustainably.

The research demonstrates that innovative strategic decision making, based on access to appropriate knowledge, occurs within the context of social and business network relations operating within a broader more diverse business ecosystem. Closer dyadic or small working group ties best facilitate trust and sharing of the most valuable knowledge. Appropriate participation in and management of such structures is therefore essential to support knowledge-based decision making, and critical to sustained competitive advantage.

The research focusses on how interfirm relationships are established and maintained, how firms establish trust and facilitate knowledge sharing forming the basis of organisational learning.