Resumo

McKinsey predicts exponential growth in the network economy to 30% representing about $60 trillion of the global corporate revenue by 2025 (Dietz, Khan, e Rab 2020).Ecosystems and platforms strategies can generate considerable value by developing core business, expanding products and services portfolio, and creating new business. Thus, the phenomenon of ‘platformization’ associated with ecosystems has created new opportunities and business models, shifting traditional competition to platform competition, from single firms to market perspective (Cennamo 2021; Hein et al. 2020),

However, to start some discussion about ecosystems and platforms is needed to clarify their meaning and multitude of the terms and definitions since they are bandied around as though they mean the same thing, but they have distinct connotations. Understanding the distinction and different platforms and ecosystems can drive different strategic approaches, implications and capabilities to enable a business model. This study explores the concepts and types of ecosystems and platforms mainly in the digital context.

There is considerable ambiguity and multifaceted meanings about ecosystems and platforms constructs depending on the context. Sometimes platforms and ecosystems can be interchangeable in the literature, causing more confusion in their definitions (de Reuver et al. 2018; Riasanow et al. 2021)

Therefore, there are some challenges to identifying a clear categorization of digital platforms and ecosystems in the literature, due to the complexity and ambiguity, the studies should consider (1) a clear definition of the constructs used in the research; (2) identification of the unit of analysis, including its boundary and the components that comprise the digital platform; and (3) specify the approach whether technical or socio-technical (Jacobides et al. 2018; de Reuver et al. 2018)

This study explored the concepts and types of ecosystems and platforms and how they are related to each other, mainly in the digital context. The SLR revealed four main clusters: Sharing economy in the digital context, Digital platform and Ecosystems - Governance and boundary resources, Digital transformation and Servitization in the ecosystems and Business Models and Dynamic Capabilities in digital platforms and ecosystems.

de Reuver, Mark, Carsten Sørensen, e Rahul C. Basole. 2018. “The Digital Platform: A Research Agenda”. Journal of Information Technology 33(2):124–35. doi: 10.1057/s41265-016-0033-3. Jacobides, Michael G., Carmelo Cennamo, e Annabelle Gawer. 2018. “Towards a theory of ecosystems”. Strategic Management Journal 39(8):2255–76. doi: 10.1002/smj.2904. Hein, Andreas, Maximilian Schreieck, Tobias Riasanow, David Soto Setzke, Manuel Wiesche, Markus Böhm, e Helmut Krcmar. 2020. “Digital platform ecosystems”. Electronic Markets 30(1):87–98. doi: 10.1007/s12525-019-00377-4.