Abstract
The management environment is moving into a new phase with the changing global circumstances. The business ecosystem as a management strategy has been studied for the last 30 years since the concept was introduced. The purpose of this study was to analyze the research trend in business ecosystem by using network next analysis and to understand the concept, being one that is still being actively studied. Network text analysis is a commonly used method to analyze research trends by forming networks based on bibliographic data of the articles, namely, keywords. For the analysis, we collected the data and keywords from 340 research papers published in global academic journals related to business ecosystem on the basis of the Scopus database. Through keywords extraction and cleansing, we found that the keywords of “innovation”, “sustainability”, and “platform” were mentioned most frequently, and the research topics were correlated to each other. Moreover, we conducted degree centrality and betweenness centrality analysis along with clustering analysis by transforming the two-mode network into a one-mode network. Degree centrality involves analyzing the degree to which one keyword links to other keywords, and betweenness centrality shows the mediating effects of a keyword to other keywords. In the centrality analysis results, “innovation”, “sustainability”, “platform”, and “business model” showed the highest degree centrality, and “sustainability”, “innovation”, “China”, and “platform” had the highest betweenness centrality. Then, we classified the clusters of subtopics into five groups. The current study examined accumulated research and suggested a comprehensive understanding of the research trend in business ecosystem by incorporating a method enabling research trend analysis to secure objectivity. This research is expected to help researchers to review the research trend in business ecosystem and identify expandable topics for further studies.
Highlights
The management environment is moving into a new phase with the changing global circumstances
As an overall review of studies containing a definition of business ecosystem, the current study examined business ecosystem definitions and categorized the definitions into four groups: (1) network, (2) actors’ role, (3) innovation, and (4) platform
This study examined the emergence of the business ecosystem concept and distinctive characteristics of business ecosystem compared to other organizational forms
Summary
The management environment is moving into a new phase with the changing global circumstances. The business ecosystem as a management strategy has been studied for the last 30 years since the concept was introduced. The purpose of this study was to analyze the research trend in business ecosystem by using network analysis and to understand the concept, being one that is still being actively studied. The current study examined accumulated research and suggested a comprehensive understanding of the research trend in business ecosystem by incorporating a method enabling research trend analysis to secure objectivity. The current study analyzes the research trend of business ecosystem that has accumulated over the last 30 years. The process of identifying and classifying subtopics studied along with business ecosystem would suggest a new idea to further research as well as review the concept overall. The business ecosystem refers to a distinctive organizational form consisting of members co-evolving their capabilities and aligning themselves with a common interest [1]
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