The term of the business ecosystem was introduced in 1993, by J. R. Moore (1993) to describe how the economic community works. Business ecosystem is defined as a large number of loosely interconnected participants who depend on each other for their mutual effectiveness and survival. Business ecosystem has been popularly discussed since the 2000s, especially by the boost of the internet. Along with the internet, the term digital ecosystem was introduced, a digital business ecosystem is defined as ‘constructed when the adoption of internet-based technologies for business is on such a level that business services and the software components are supported by a pervasive software environment, which shows an evolutionary and self-organizing behaviour’. The digital ecosystem has been applied to present the IT infrastructure or the software platform.
Business ecosystem is popularly used to investigate a complex social system with the business perspective, and particularly contributes to the understanding of actors and their relations in the innovation research. However, the aspect of business ecosystem modelling is limited discussed in the literature, although the importance has emerged significantly in recent years due to the emphasis on cross-disciplinary research and digitalization with artificial intelligence.
Digital Business Ecosystem as a free, open source and distributed software platform, based on internet technologies, has enabled entrepreneurs specifically the small and medium entrepreneurs to create integrate and provide products and services more efficiently and effectively. The impact of this ecosystem on the business enterprises across the sectors is so fast and central that it has significantly changed almost all the paradigms of the entrepreneurship process. Aware of this colossal impact, economies all over the world are providing favourable policy framework support to facilitate the establishment of this ecosystem so that it becomes easier for the entrepreneurs to transform their business operations on the digital platforms.