Visualizing business ecosystems: Applying a collaborative modelling process in two case studies

Business ecosystems are increasingly gaining relevance in research and practice. Because business ecosystems progressively change, enterprises are interested in analysing their ecosystem, to identify and address such changes. In order to gain a comprehensive picture of the business ecosystem, various stakeholders of the enterprise should be involved in the analysis process. We propose a collaborative approach to model and visualize the business ecosystem and we validate four central roles in the modelling process. The process consists of six steps, namely the definition of the business ecosystem focus, instantiation of the model, data collection, provision of tailored visualizations, collecting feedback and adapting the models, and using the visualization ‘to tell a story’. In this paper, we report case studies of two companies that have instantiated ecosystem models.