Key challenges of digital business ecosystem development and how to cope with them

Abstract Elaborating on a theoretical outline of digital business ecosystems, the paper describes key challenges in terms of interoperability and actor-related issues. By comparing two scenarios – one from China and one from Germany – different ways to cope with these challenges can be illustrated. The case from China demonstrates a top-down development with a strong focus on interoperability but obstacles remain for the further co-evolution of partners. By contrast, the German scenario outlines the design for a decentralized bottom-up approach according to specific solutions. In this example, distributed competences among partners and a clear customer focus become visible, but a missing technological platform is a severe hindering factor. In summary it reveals that both, the top-down and the bottom-up scenario, show significant benefits for digital business ecosystems. Based on these findings, we see high value in conceptualizing an integrative framework designed to utilize the benefits of both approaches for context-specific advancements of business ecosystems. Therefore, we introduce a laboratory concept for designing, exploring and further testing situated measures and enablers that contribute to the context-specific evolution of ecosystems.