Conceptual Models and Evaluation Metrics for Transboundary Service Ecosystems

“Transboundary” has become a common phenomenon in today's Internet-based service industries. Service providers are not only focused on their original business domains but also extend their attentions to other domains. By aggregating and orchestrating services from different domains to form complex innovative transboundary services, distinct new values are created and delivered to customers. Along with increasing interconnections among services from different domains, many novel transboundary service ecosystems (TSE) emerge. In this paper, we give a six-layered conceptual model for TSE, including atomic service layer, organization layer, region layer, inner-domain layer, cross-domain layer, and customer demand layer. Types of competitions and collaborations in TSE are elaborately refined. A set of ecological metrics for evaluating state of TSE constituents, state of TSE as a whole, and distribution of customer demands, are emphatically discussed. This work gives a high-level inspection on transboundary services from an ecological standpoint, and is of great significance for service providers to identify innovation opportunities in a service ecosystem, and for regulators to issue laws and regulations to guide the healthy development of transboundary service industries.