A review of the ecosystem concept — Towards coherent ecosystem design
By Masaharu Tsujimoto, Yuya Kajikawa, Junichi Tomita, Yoichi Matsumoto. Technological forecasting & social change, 2017
461 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract The ecosystem concept is of increasing significance in the field of the management of technology and innovation. This paper provides an overview of 90 previous studies using the ecosystem concept in this field, all published in leading academic journals, and clarifies their four major research streams. The first stream is the industrial ecology perspective, which is based on the concept of industrial ecosystems. The second is the business ecosystem perspective. This approach is based on the theory of organizational boundaries. Within the business ecosystem perspective, some influential scholars emphasize platform management, which represents the third approach. The fourth approach is the multi-actor network perspective, which contributes dynamic behavioral relationship analyses based on social network theory. This perspective expands the range of analysis to include a variety of actors in addition to private companies. As a result of the review, this study presents an integrated model of the existing literature. Furthermore, this paper proposes original definitions of the ecosystem and the concept of a coherent ecosystem. This coherency is the core concept underlying the explanation of the dynamic evolution or extinction of the ecosystem. Finally, this paper discusses the significance of the ecosystem concept and indicates topics for future research.
Subfields: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Management Science and Operations Research
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f8b8c3f330884b54666145c8f117f1374f434a0c
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Management Science and Operations Research
Citations in the corpus
- Leveraging complexity for ecosystemic innovation (2018, background): “Besides pure academic studies (f.e., Fukuda and Watanabe, 2008; Tsujimoto et al., 2017), literature on innovation ecosystems now embraces a variety of research and expert communities.”