The changing business landscapes urge organizations to collaborate and combine their expertise to stay competitive. Organizations establish partnerships and collaborate via the Internet, which often happens dynamically and at fast pace resulting in formation of Digital Business Ecosystems (DBEs). DBEs are complex and their management requires having explicit and up-to-date information about them. Modeling enables thorough visual analysis and facilitates the understanding and formation of DBEs. It also allows viewing DBEs through multiple perspectives, as well as exploring alternatives in the course of DBE formation or management. This systematic review aims to synthesize existing studies pertaining to Conceptual Modeling for analysis, design, and management of DBEs. A total of 94 studies were included in the review. The findings suggest that there is a scarcity of existing Conceptual Modeling methods and tools supporting DBEs. Additionally, the extensive emphasis on DBEs’ actors in modeling leads to an urgent need for the methods to be extended to support the establishment of holistic views for integrating multiple perspectives of DBEs. Future research should focus on these areas to facilitate the transformation of how organization’s collaborations are viewed – from a single-organization to a multitude of viewpoints on organizational networks of collaboration, coexistence, and competition. Such models also need to support the key features of DBEs, such as resilience and automation.

Significant amount of business collaboration takes place online which supports efficient and dynamic business partnerships. Once such partnerships reach a critical mass, a digital business ecosystem (DBE) forms. While it is beneficial to its actors, it is also complex and more difficult to manage. A key management concern is resilience, especially in the context of digitalization. The relevant goals influencing the DBE resilience are diversity, efficiency, adaptability, and cohesion, which need to be aligned with business goals of a specific DBE and managed accordingly. To this end, the paper investigates the suitability of capability management for the purpose of analyzing DBEs to support resilience and demonstrates capability models for a digital health use case in the healthcare sector.

Digital Business Ecosystem is an emerging phenomenon aimed to reflect the behavior of natural ecosystems as a networked and online business model involving heterogeneous actors being engaged in a shared business vision and its implementation. Such as in an ecosystem, in a DBE, the actors are highly dependent on each other in terms of their capabilities and resources. It is, therefore, one of the essential needs for the research on DBEs to advance in understanding of which roles and responsibilities are entailed in enabling a DBE to function and sustain on a long-term basis. We have, in this study, performed a survey on the existing scientific studies related to the roles within DBEs, classified the collected results, and integrated them to a unified proposal. Using a recently developed and functioning DBE concerning the improvement of preventive healthcare by provisioning, exchanging, and using of a set of relevant resources, we have presented an initial validation of the correctness and fit of the proposal for the roles of actors and their responsibilities.

Digital Business Ecosystem (DBE) supports organizations to collaborate and combine their expertise to stay competitive through ICTs. Being beneficial to the organizations, DBEs are also complex and more difficult to manage. Through visual analysis and knowledge explication, modelling can increase the transparency of DBEs and improve the understanding of DBEs through multiple perspectives. However, current scientific literature suggests a lack of methodological guidance for modelling in support of the analysis, design, and management of DBEs. The purpose of this interview study was to elicit requirements and needs for developing a holistic method of modelling DBEs. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to explore and understand DBEs from an industrial and experts’ viewpoints with 11 participants from different business domains. The empirical data was analyzed using Thematic Analysis, which lead to 30 requirements, categorized into four classes, namely, requirements for model creation, analysis, management of DBE, as well as cross cutting requirements addressing the overall establishment and use of the modelling method.

Digital business ecosystem (DBE) is a paradigm that enables developing and monitoring novel business models of collaborating organisations and individuals using ICT as the foundation. Different from traditional online networked models such as manufacturer, retailer, or franchise centred, using a shared digital environment, DBE fosters heterogeneity, symbiosis, coevolution, and self-organisation of its multiple actors, which enables it to span different business domains as well as exhibits diverse interests. For many organisations and individuals, DBE presents a new collaborative approach to leverage offered and desired resources among the involved members to meet each of their goals. As such, it is foreseen to be of high value to the involved actors, but at the same time, it is often complex due to many correlated interactions of these actors and thus difficult to design and manage. Furthermore, the current state of the art shows a lack of methodological guidance for DBE design. We propose a method for DBE design that follows the requirements collected from industry experts and practitioners by applying situational method engineering to enable its modularised design. The method for design is validated by action research in the setting of Digital Vaccine, a Swedish DBE managing health-related services.

The Digital Business Ecosystem (DBE) theory has evolved to facilitate the functioning of open business networks by adopting the ecosystem paradigm from nature in a shared digital environment. While it enables exhibiting diverse interests, it also places high demands on managing the DBE’s resilience. The current research lacks support for how a DBE-based business model can be integrated with its supporting information system’s data structure to enable the design and monitoring of resilience for indicating the needed adaptations caused by changes in DBE’s actors, their engagement or performance balance. We propose and instantiate a meta-model that describes the DBE’s entities relevant to its design using the CIVIS ecosystem. The meta-model provides a foundation for a modelling language for the management of the resilience of DBE.

In contrast to traditional business models, Digital Business Ecosystems (DBE) have several distinctive features - heterogeneity of involved actors, symbiosis in the exchange of resources, co-evolution of their interactions, and self-organisation. Designing DBEs is a task demanding a well-defined DBE’s scope, roles and responsibilities of the actors, their interactions and dependencies, as well as versatile technologies and data. The study focuses on two DBEs – Marispace-X and Skippo in the maritime domain to capture the tenets of the blue economy with dataspaces. Because the design approaches to DBE are scarce due to the paradigm’s novelty, the study aims to evaluate a model-based design method, DBEmap. The evaluation results concerning practitioners’ perceived usefulness of the DBEmap and its support for integrating DBE-related perspectives and designing and managing DBE resilience are presented.