Assessing Organisational Engagement in Digital Business Ecosystems

The challenges of increasing competition induced by globalisation motivate enterprises enthuse over participating collaborative networks, such as the Digital Business Ecosystems (DBEs). A DBE is a socio-technical network of individuals, organisations and technologies that collectively co-create values through the collaboration facilitated by shared digital platforms. Considering its enormous impact which allows companies to gain their competitiveness and improve resilience, the concept of DBE becomes attractively prominent. However, the increasing collaboration complexity in DBEs lead to uncertainty about firms’ organisational and technological capabilities prior to engaging in DBE. To address this issue, firstly, the purpose of this paper is to survey the DBEs in typical industries with a comparison of their main DBE features. Secondly, to facilitate the companies to participate in a DBE, the prerequisites and potential indicators that prepares firms prior to engagement in collaborative DBEs are identified by adopting Organisation Semiotics (OS) theory. Finally, this study also analyses the strengths and weakness of current proposals regarding the establishment of critical criteria for collaborative digital business ecosystems.