Classroom Companion: Business

Digital Economy 
Ecosystem
Contents
4.1 
 Ecosystem Metaphor – 46
4.2 
 Ecosystem Components – 48
4.3 
 The Layered Internet
as Ecosystem Component – 51
4.4 
 Computer Infrastructure 
and Platforms as Ecosystem 
Components – 54
4.5 
 Applications and Content 
as Ecosystem Component – 56
4.6 
 Consumers as Ecosystem
Component – 56
4.7 
 Authorities as Ecosystem
Components – 57
4.8 
 Conclusions – 58
 References – 59
4

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46
4
 
n Learning Objectives
After completing this chapter, you should be able to:
5
Identify both direct and indirect the stakeholders in the ecosystem of a company 
in the digital market.
5
Analyze the impact each stakeholder has on the market performance.
5
Identify the interactions, critical relationships, and dependencies between the 
stakeholders.
4.1 
 Ecosystem Metaphor
The concept of business ecosystems was first proposed by James F. Moore in 
1993 in a Harvard Business Review article (Moore, 
1993
):
“To extend a systematic approach to strategy, I suggest that a company be 
viewed not as a member of a single industry but as part of a business ecosystem 
that crosses a variety of industries. In a business ecosystem, companies coevolve 
capabilities around a new innovation: they work cooperatively and competitively 
to support new products, satisfy customer needs, and eventually incorporate the 
next round of innovations.”
Since then, the concept has been used regularly as a tool to analyze business 
strategies; in particular, the complex businesses arising in the digital economy.
The concept is a biological metaphor since many of the new digital businesses 
are imbedded in a complex community of other cooperating and competing busi-
nesses and customers much like the coevolving ecosystems in biology. Removing 
one stakeholder from this community may have severe repercussion on the busi-
nesses of the remaining stakeholders in the same way as the removal of one species 
in a biological ecosystem may sometimes alter the whole ecosystem system in a 
negative way or even destroy it. 
7
Box 
4.1
 illustrates the vulnerability of a biologi-
cal ecosystem where the removal of a single species destroys the whole ecosystem. 
Industry may be equally vulnerable to apparently small alterations in the business 
environment, for example, change in regulations, customer habits, discovery of 
new raw materials, and better production methods.