Business Ecosystems Revisited

Coined by Tansley in 1935 to designate a basic ecological unit composed of both the environment and the organisms that inhabit it, the term ecosystem was taken up again by Moore (1993) to designate the systems of actors maintaining relationships of coopetition: business ecosystems. Moore’s definition is regularly employed in academic literature today, without having been the object of in-depth discussion. With critical intention, the first section of this research note sets out to show the weakness of this ecological metaphor, a metaphor which, without a doubt, contributed to the success of the concept, but which, today, needs to be put aside. It will then be demonstrated that Moore’s efforts to define the business ecosystem led to contradictions and, in order to circumvent these contradictions, the second section will distinguish among different types of business ecosystems. Apart from avoiding the wholesale attribution of characteristics to all business ecosystems, when, in fact, they rightly belong to only certain among them, this typology brings our attention to business ecosystems whose composition is more heterogeneous. The last part of this note suggests that a study of these systems should use theories that may shed light on the way in which actors come to agreement even while belonging to different worlds.