A Digital Ecosystem for Co-Creating Business with People

In recent years, we have seen the rise of Web 2.0, in which users become co-creators and software turns into services. During the last two years, we have also witnessed the phenomenal success of Apple’s App Store for which people produce the applications and can also create business of them. While the technologies and business services related to these phenomena have been studied separately, we suggest that the underlying digital ecosystem that ties them together has not been made explicit. In this paper, we provide a conceptual model of a digital ecosystem for understanding how companies can co-create business with people. To construct such a model, we use multiple case study approach and explore two cases: an ecosystem around smart phone application market App Store and an ecosystem around bioinformatics service registry BioCatalogue. Our results suggest that the required technical solutions and business services are now available. However, to make business flourish, the orchestration of the overall ecosystem is also essential and needs to be taken care of.