Modelling the Emergence and Evolution of e-Business Ecosystems from a Network Perspective

In recent years, we notice that the cooperation and competition among enterprises become much more complicated. Managers have to pay more attention to external cooperation from an ecological view. As e-business adoption becomes more pervasive, business ecosystems are shifting to e-business ecosystems. Because the situation is becoming more serious, in order to control the e-business ecosystem and earn profit from it, it is necessary for us to learn its structure and evolution. From the perspective of network science, this paper tries to connect complex network theories with e-business ecosystem research. We firstly analyse network structure of e-business ecosystem. Then an evolutionary model is proposed to describe the emergence and evolution of it. We finally use simulation and empirical methods to valid the theory we proposed.