A digital ecosystem is a distributed, adaptive, open socio-technical system with properties of self-organisation, scalability and sustainability inspired from natural ecosystems. Digital ecosystem models are informed by knowledge of natural ecosystems, especially for aspects related to competition and collaboration among diverse entities. The term is used in the computer industry, the entertainment industry, and the World Economic Forum.
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Digital Business Ecosystem
The metaphor of Digital Business Ecosystem was proposed to describe a self-organizing business community that relied on Information Technology (IT) to achieve the objectives set for the European Union at Lisbon Council l, also known as Lisbon Strategy: higher growth, more and more qualified jobs and greater social inclusion.
The original model took into account the specifics of the European market, mostly based on networks of SMEs and local innovation systems.
A first wave of research on Digital Business Ecosystems was funded by the European Commission within the European Sixth Framework Program (FP6), including a flagship large-scale Integrated Project (EU) (IP) called Digital Business Ecosystems (DBE), and a Network of Excellence called Open Philosophies for Associative Autopoietic Digital Ecosystems (OPAALS). All projects of this initial wave focused on new models and technologies for fostering a Digital Business Ecosystem in Europe. The topic was later retained as a strategic objective within the European Commission's CIP and the Regions for Economic Change work programs. Today, the vision of Digital Business Ecosystems has become mature, and is widely used in the scientific literature to describe business-oriented socio-technical systems regardless of their location and structure.
History
The concept of Digital Business Ecosystem was put forward in 2002 by a group of European researchers and practitioners, including Francesco Nachira, Paolo Dini and Andrea Nicolai, who applied the general notion of digital ecosystems to model the process of adoption and development of ICT-based products and services in competitive, highly fragmented markets like the European one. Elizabeth Chang, Ernesto Damiani and Tharam Dillon started in 2007 the IEEE Digital EcoSystems and Technologies Conference (IEEE DEST).
Perspectives
The digital ecosystem metaphor and models have been applied to a number of business areas related to the production and distribution of knowledge-intensive products and services, including higher education. The perspective of this research is providing methods and tools to achieve a set of objectives of the ecosystem (e.g. sustainability, fairness, bounded information asymmetry, risk control and gracious failure). These objectives are seen as desirable properties whose emergence should be fostered by the digital ecosystem self-organization, rather than as explicit design goals like in conventional IT.