Bachelor's Thesis Maximilian Riemhofer

Definitions and Characteristics of Different Business Ecosystem Types, and Identification of Suitable Visualization Tools

Abstract

Every day, companies interact with each other on multiple levels, be it supplying of products, cooperating on common projects, or working on a shared platform such as Apple's App Store. These interactions are vital for our capitalist markets, as they help companies to stay competitive and facilitate production processes (Iyer and Basole, 2016). Additionally, enterprises are able to focus on their competencies, and sell them to other enterprises with a different business focus. In literature, such networks are referred to as business ecosystems (Basole et al., 2015)(Moore, 1996)(Sako, 2018). A visualization of such a business ecosystem can help companies as well as researchers to better understand its structure or topology and can reveal key players and trends (Iyer and Basole, 2016).

This Bachelor's Thesis aims at, firstly, comparing definitions of business ecosystems that already exist in literature. In the second step, different types of business ecosystems are characterized and compared. Finally, the thesis concludes by identifying criteria to identify suitable visualizations and visualization tools and applies them on already existing visualization tools without business ecosystem focus.

At first, a structured mapping study with pre-defined search queries as well as citation-based search is performed to receive relevant literature for the definitions for a business ecosystem. Next, business ecosystem types and structures are identified from the literature, compared and categorized. Finally, visual analytics is incorporated into the business ecosystem concept by categorizing visual approaches and analyzing existing business ecosystem visualization tools.