The Endogenous Mechanisms and Dynamics of the Business Ecosystem Evolution:A Process Study

Abstract

A business ecosystem is a complex dynamic system within which components interact with each other to drive the changes of other components and the whole ecosystem. Although dynamics has been widely identified as a core feature of the ecosystem, how the actual interactions among the components happen and aggregate to drive the self-evolution of the ecosystem have been rarely studied. Adopting a longitudinal inductive case study approach, this study disentangles the interactions among ecosystem components and delineates a temporal recursive pattern of six-phase paths of the business ecosystem evolution. We find that the generative mechanisms underlying business ecosystem evolution are the successive negation of the negation of phases (meso-level explanation) and the self-governing regulators (micro-level explanation) that continually trigger new phases. This explorative inductive study unveils how interactions of components accumulate to drive the ecosystem evolution, which provides a transparent and deeper understanding of the micro-macro linking process.