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) supports organizations to combine their expertise in a novel collaborative network through information and communications technology. Despite its beneficial aspects, a DBE is intricate and difficult to manage due to the dependent interactions and interrelationships among actors. Modelling, as a proven way to deal with complex problems in organisational settings, can support the capturing and documenting of a DBE. This can enhance the level of abstraction of the DBE to aid the analysis and decision-making. However, current scientific literature shows a lack of methodological guidance for modelling in support of the analysis, design, and management of DBEs. Hence, in this study, we have proposed a foundation for a DBE design, analysis, and management method based on Situational Method Engineering (SME). Using the requirements empirically collected from a number of industrial practitioners and experts, the main concepts and intentions relevant to DBE design, analysis and management were defined. Based on them, using the SME approach, we modelled and presented several method process parts that layout fulfilment of the intentions for the concepts’ development using different, situation-related, strategies (i.e. method chunks).