The role of ecosystems in business and management – a systematic review of the literature

The role of ecosystems in business and management ? a systematic review of the literature Lara-Kristin Baszok The York Management School, University of York, UK 1st Year PhD Student (expected end-date 31.12.2021) lara-kristin.baszok@york.ac. uk Introduction Over the last few years business and management scholars have shown an increasing interest into the phenomenon of ecosystems. Due to the relative novelty of the phenomenon, the term is used ambiguously and there is no clear definition of what constitutes an ecosystem (Teece, 2018). Besides, research addressed this phenomenon from a variety of different angles. The combination of the ambiguous usage of the term and the broad research interest lead to the emergence of several subterms and a variety of different research streams and outcomes. Recent work started to develop a coherent overview of the current research on ecosystems and the related open research avenues. However, this is often limited to the dominant ecosystem types (Jacobides et al., 2018) or a specific research domain (Tsujimoto et al., 2018). Therefore this paper seeks to contribute to existing work by conducting a broad systematic literature review (SLR) on ecosystem research in business and management. Thus, the researcher developed the following two research questions which this SLR seeks to answer: RQ1: What are the main ecosystem terms used in the literature and how do they relate to each other? RQ2: What are the main research streams and their findings and what research avenues remain open? Methodology The research methodology followed the three major steps proposed by Tranfield et al. (2003): planning, conducting and reporting. By adopting a content-analysis-based approach the researcher aimed to gain a coherent overview into existing literature on the topic. The search for papers was conducted in two databases: Web of Knowledge and Scopus. Both sources provide a large selection of peer-reviewed journals in business and management, which is important to ensure a comprehensive selection of papers. As ecosystems are discussed in several different contexts, the search string constituted of only ? ecosystem*? to avoid any upfront selection bias. Papers were included if the respective journal was ranked within the Academic Journal Guide. Applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria reduced the original sample from 3,239 papers to 132 papers. The decisions were based on title and abstract, if necessary the author skimmed the full paper or asked for the opinion of another academic. Results Regarding the first research question the review shows that while research uses a large number of ecosystem terms, six terms are dominant in the literature. These differ along three dimensions: leadership, boundaries and purpose. Besides, specific terms seem to be dominantly used within specific research areas. Regarding the second question, the author identified that research can be clustered into four categories (1) Terminology and relevance of ecosystems; (2) Ecosystem lifecycle; (3) Firm-level ecosystem strategy and (4) Ecosystem orchestration, with each one consisting of several sub-streams. Generally, it was found that ecosystems have been studied from different angles and in the context of different ecosystem types. Therefore it is difficult to decide, whether findings apply to ecosystems in general or just to a specific type. Further the absence of an agreed definition leads to scholars studying different phenomena under the ecosystem umbrella or to adopting different terminology for the same kind of ecosystem. Discussion & Conclusion Empirical research is dominated by case-studies and spread across all different ecosystem types, which hampers generalisation. Thus, ecosystem research would benefit greatly from a clearer conceptualisation or agreed definition of the phenomenon in general and the different sub-terms used in the literature. Nevertheless the SLR identified some research avenues that, regardless of the specific ecosystem context, promise helpful contributions to management research. One of the key points across all ecosystem research is mutual interdependency and the assumption that competition shifts from firm-level to system-level focus. If that is the case, research should seek to explore how this influences firm-level strategy, for example regarding managing innovation and product development. Research could explore how to manage value creation if the locus of the activities shifts to a meta-level outside the control of a specific firm. Another promising avenue for further research is to explore what kind of resources and capabilities firms need to create or operate within an ecosystem and how these can be obtained or developed. While research started to do this from the perspective of platform ecosystems, the research is limited to a specific context and role (Helfat & Raubitschek, 2018; Teece, 2017) and should be broadened to include other ecosystem members or types of ecosystems. References Helfat, C.E. and Raubitschek, R.S. 2018. Dynamic and integrative capabilities for profiting from innovation in digital platform-based ecosystems. Research Policy. 47(8),pp.1391? 1399. Jacobides, M.G. et al. 2018. Towards a theory of ecosystems. Strategic Management Journal. 39(8),pp. 2255? 2276. Teece, D.J. 2017. Dynamic capabilities and (digital) platform lifecycles. Advances in Strategic Management. 37,pp.211? 226. Teece, D.J. 2018. Profiting from innovation in the digital economy: Enabling technologies, standards, and licensing models in the wireless world. Research Policy. 47(8),pp.1367? 1387. Tranfield, D. et al. 2003. Towards a methodology for developing evidence-informed management knowledge by means of systematic review. British Journal of Management. 14,pp.207? 222. Tsujimoto, M. et al. 2018. A review of the ecosystem concept ? Towards coherent ecosystem design. Technological Forecasting and Social Change. 136(December 2015),pp.49? 58.