Hybrid Machine Learning for Matchmaking in Digital Business Ecosystems

This paper is an introduction to Business Ecosystems and its improvements as represented in Digital Business Ecosystem. In traditional non-digital economic ecosystems, the hubs, once established are static. It is difficult to create new hubs and as such these established hubs enjoy considerable power in the marketplace. Indeed, in many instances, these hubs become the main impediments for the growth of smaller nodes. In other instances, they try to misuse their powers by creating monopolies or oligopolies. In contrast, it is hoped that Digital Business Ecosystems, by virtue of their loosely-coupled and self-organizing properties, will help Small and Medium Enterprises to create a fully distributed network, sidestepping the above mentioned problems of dominance of the large hubs in the market. The authors try to provide a brief introduction to Business Ecosystems and focus on the reasons and advantages of such a move/transition towards Digital Business Ecosystems.

This research investigates how the dimensions of the Technology, Organization, and Environment (TOE) framework influence the digital business ecosystem (DBE) and, in turn, how this ecosystem impacts the adoption of Islamic Mobile Banking (IMB). It addresses a gap in existing literature by adopting a customer-centric perspective, highlighting how DBE affects IMB adoption, a departure from previous studies that primarily focused on internal organizational factors. To achieve its objectives, the study employs a quantitative approach using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) to analyze data from 985 IMB users in Indonesia. The findings reveal that DBE significantly influences IMB adoption, particularly when moderated by customer behavior as an environmental factor. Factors such as perceived usefulness and ease of use within the technological domain, firm reputation and innovation within the organizational domain, and perceived risk and sharia compliance as environmental factors all positively and significantly impact DBE. Additionally, perceived security has a significant effect on DBE, especially when mediated by perceived ease of use. Furthermore, DBE serves as a crucial mediator between all dimensions of the TOE framework and IMB adoption. This research offers a theoretical contribution by examining the TOE framework dimensions from a customer's perspective, revealing their impact on DBE and IMB adoption. From a managerial perspective, the study provides valuable insights for banks on how to effectively manage technological, environmental, and organizational dimensions to strengthen DBE and promote IMB adoption.

Improving the rural economic climate to narrow the rural-urban economic gap is necessary in order to address the problematic urbanization phenomenon in many developing countries. To this end, the participation of rural communities in the digital business ecosystem is being viewed as a promising approach. However, there are high barriers that hinder rural communities from participating in the digital business ecosystem. The barriers are mainly due to the low digital readiness of the rural communities, the limited government capability, and the limited third-party involvement. With an aim to lower these barriers, our paper proposes the architectural specification of a digital platform based on a service-oriented architecture, where the provisioning of digital business services for rural communities is realized through a collaboration between the government and third-party service providers. The proposed architecture has been instantiated by means of a prototype and validated by a panel of experts from the rural areas of West Java, Indonesia.

This study examines the roles of collaboration and innovation in developing digital business ecosystems. It employs a narrative literature review of core scholarship on business ecosystems, digital platforms, and collaboration–innovation practices in both global and Indonesian contexts. The synthesis indicates that digital business ecosystems constitute multilateral interdependence structures that require alignment of roles and activities across actors to realize a shared value proposition. Collaboration therefore becomes a structural necessity, as ecosystem innovation is modular and complementary, and value emerges only when contributions from diverse parties are coherently integrated. Digital platforms accelerate ecosystem growth through generativity and network effects, yet they also demand collaborative governance to keep collective innovation coordinated and goal-oriented. Empirical evidence further shows that collaboration facilitated by platforms, hubs, or intermediaries speeds up the exchange of data, knowledge, and resources, triggering technological, service, governance, and business-model innovations that enhance ecosystem performance and sustainability. However, many ecosystems still face limitations in the depth of collaboration—often not progressing to co-production or joint R&D—resulting in suboptimal collective innovation. This study enriches digital ecosystem theory and offers practical implications for orchestrating collaboration and sustaining innovation in digital business ecosystems.

The system described herein represents the first example of a recommender system in digital ecosystems where agents negotiate services on behalf of small companies. The small companies compete not only with price or quality but also with a wider service-by-service composition by subcontracting with other companies. The final result of these offerings depends on negotiations at the scale of millions of small companies. This scale requires new platforms for supporting digital business ecosystems (DBEs), as well as related services like open-id, trust management, monitors, and recommenders. This is done in the Open Negotiation Environment (ONE), which is an open-source platform that allows agents, on behalf of small companies, to negotiate and use the ecosystem services, and enables the development of new agent technologies. The methods and tools of cyber engineering are necessary to build up ONEs that are stable, a basic condition for predictable and reliable business environments. Aiming to build stable DBEs by means of improved collective intelligence, we introduce a model of negotiation-style dynamics from the point of view of computational ecology. This model inspires an ecosystem monitor and a novel negotiation-style recommender (NSR). The ecosystem monitor provides hints to the NSR to achieve greater stability of ONE in a DBE. The greater stability provides the small companies with higher predictability and, therefore, better business results. The NSR is implemented with a simulated-annealing algorithm at a constant temperature, and its impact is shown by applying it to a real case of ONE populated by Italian companies.

We investigate an abstract conceptualisation of Digital Ecosystems from a computer science perspective. We then provide a conceptual framework for the cross pollination of ideas, concepts and understanding between different classes of ecosystems through the universally applicable principles of Complex Adaptive System (CAS) modelling. A framework to assist the cross-disciplinary collaboration of research into Digital Ecosystems, including Digital Business Ecosystems (DBEs) and Digital Knowledge Ecosystems (DKEs). So, we have defined the key steps towards a theoretical framework for Digital the Ecosystems, that is compatible with the diverse theoretical views prevalent. Therefore, a theoretical edifice that can unify the diverse efforts within Digital Ecosystems research.

In contrast to traditional business models, digital business ecosystems (DBEs) have several distinctive features—heterogeneity of involved actors, symbiosis in the exchange of resources, co-evolution of their interactions, and self-organisation. Designing DBEs is a task demanding a well-defined DBE’s scope, roles and responsibilities of the actors, their interactions and dependencies, as well as versatile technologies and data. The study focuses on two DBEs—Marispace-X and Skippo in the maritime domain to capture the tenets of the blue economy with dataspaces. Because the design approaches to DBE are scarce due to the paradigm’s novelty, the study aims to evaluate a model-based design method, DBEmap. The evaluation results concerning practitioners’ perceived usefulness of the DBEmap and its support for integrating DBE-related perspectives and benchmarking DBE resilience are presented. Reflections on the applicability of DBEmap and its implications for organisational support, highlighting the systematic guidance and actionable outcomes observed in the two case workshops, are discussed alongside the study’s limitations and directions for future research.

In this paper the authors describe the implementation of an ecologically inspired Digital Business Ecosystem (DBE) to promote and improve business collaboration by allowing Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) to find partners for interaction. Building on the analysis of how biologically-inspired computing is useful to represent business interactions and how small firms can benefit from this, the authors employ a methodology for defining ecological interactions among agents (SMEs) in a multi-agent system for the implementation of MADBE, an open-source Multi-Agent DBE. With MADBE, SMEs are able to publish their characteristics, services and needs and the system, using an intelligent protocol of interaction, simulates business interactions and suggests the optimal collaborative links between the participant firms that ultimately can derive in new joint ventures.

The digital business ecosystem (DBE) project experimented with new ways of bringing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) into a major R&D project. Such involvement is an important factor in projects where the R&D performers are not the exploiters. The project utilised the social capital of regional actors, and conceptualised a certain kind of SME, known as driver SMEs. The strategy adopted has worked for this project and has provided a basis for self-sustained post-project expansion. In doing so it has created a model that could easily be adopted by other projects, both in Digital Ecosystems and beyond.

A key indicator of today's global business system supported by service oriented architecture (SOA), is the reliability and uptime. This concern is crucial for e-commerce sites and mission-critical business applications. SOA modelling is used to implement the concept of digital business ecosystem (DBE). In computing environment of DBE a chain of components link business applications together, and the strength of this chain, in terms of reliability and performance, will determine the success or failure of the business. One way to make the chain stronger is to increase the reliability of all components involved, especially the critical components of the chain. In this paper, we address the reliability issue of digital ecosystem's transactions. The major contribution of this research is to propose a framework for reliable transactions in DE, via the analysis of the reliability for Web services computing.

In this paper, which is only an opening exploration, we are imagining a multi-vendor component-based robotic software system as a digital business ecosystem. We have explored implementing model-based electronic institutions, “SmartIN” on RobMoSys (EU H2020 project) compliant SmartMDSD toolchain. This extension to SmartMDSD lets software components spontaneously remodel their service behaviour according to the institution they conform to. Electronic institutions in “SmartIN” are envisioned as models that collect several services and encapsulate patterns of their related behaviour in a rule-based multi-agent organisation. The presented idea and associated tooling are functionally adequate as a vessel. The authors lack inputs from multi-disciplinary experts for an accurate and deep understanding of possible models and mechanisms that should be incorporated to make the presented vessel truly beneficial. Hence parts of the work and tools are being shared with the community at an early stage.KeywordsModel-Driven Engineering (MDE)Component-Based Software Development (CBSD)Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)Service-Oriented Business Ecosystem (SOBE)Electronic Institutions (EI)Digital Business Ecosystems (DBE)Electronic contractsCoalition formation

During the almost 27 years of its existence, the business ecosystem research has developed a substantial level of ambiguity and multifacetedness. Because to the technological advancements that promote interconnectedness and value co-creation, the field has consequently spun off into more domain-specific branches, such as the arena of digital business ecosystems that are driven by Internet of Things (IoT). Nonetheless, despite the efforts to mend the theoretical foundations and to close the gap between academia and empirical practice, the absolute majority of IoT-driven digital business ecosystem literature follows the trend of conceptual randomness while expanding the volume of publications exponentially. Therefore, in order to address this unfavourable increase in random adoption of distinct concepts that ultimately refer to the same subject matter, the author encourages other scholars involved in the research field of IoT-driven digital business ecosystems to make extended efforts and support the external validity of their research (as well as the relevance of the research stream as a whole) by bounding the IoT-driven digital business ecosystems on a rigorous basis through deploying the extant theory in a careful and appropriate manner. Via a thorough examination of the theoretical fundaments that underpin the concept of IoT-driven digital business ecosystem, and based on a concise thematic review of corresponding literature published until September 2020, this article articulates logic for viewing the conceptual hierarchy within the business ecosystem research and proposes six literature-based recommendations for developing further IoT-driven digital business ecosystem (DBE) research in a rigorous way.

Today, one of the main directions of the maritime sector and especially of port development is the adoption and implementation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in various areas of port activities such as port business, management and planning, commercial and supporting services, contact with clients, navigation, etc. Furthermore, great efforts are made in order to integrate applications and provide value-added services using e-business approaches. This direction creates a new economic environment, a digital maritime economy that includes the development of innovative software applications and their use by maritime companies in an ever-evolving dynamic business ecosystem. Inevitably, this new condition requires the transformation of companies involved in a type of Digital Business Ecosystem (DBE), through the adoption and implementation of interdisciplinary methods and techniques based on biology and e-business models. The paper begins with a discussion of the origin of the term business ecosystem as well as the relevant theory for the development of the digital business ecosystem. The next chapter gives a detailed description of the DBE concept for port activities and services through the development of a conceptual business platform that supports e-services. Conclusions are summarized in the last chapter.

We research different types of literature about (Digital Business Ecosystems) DBE, to find the state of the art and then support opportunities in this subject. The bibliometric definition: Bibliometrics is a powerful tool that provides the opportunity to identify the areas of knowledge to conduct new research and to find the new opportunities in different subjects. Through a bibliometric study, the aim is to analyze the indicators on information about the subject; Digital Business Ecosystem, which allow us to know the level of scientific activity related to this area. Also, the use of the database Scopus, allows interpreting results and to find the needs in some fields of research. Keywords Ecosystem, business, digital, bibliometrics, Scopus

This article focuses on the construction logic of the digital business ecosystem driven by big data, and conducts an in-depth analysis with the SHEIN model as a typical case. This paper expounds the connotation and characteristics of the digital business ecosystem, analyzes the core logic of its construction driven by big data, including the data intelligence hub, the integrated infrastructure of cloud, network and terminal, blockchain and trusted ecosystem, etc. At the same time, a detailed discussion will be conducted on the practices of the SHEIN model in digital operation, flexible supply chain, global layout and other aspects, revealing the inspirations of its successful experiences for the construction of the digital business ecosystem, and providing theoretical references and practical lessons for the development of enterprises in the digital economy era.