SOFTWARE ECOSYSTEMS AND DIGITAL PLATFORMS – A THEORETICAL REVIEW

Recent literature has focused increasingly on software ecosystems and digital platforms. Digital platforms, as the foundation that supports software ecosystems’ development, have reshaped the traditional business models by focusing more on new dimensions such as stakeholders instead of customers and suppliers, or value co-creation instead of value creation. Software ecosystems contribute significantly to how business is conducted around the world. By performing an overview of recent literature published in Web of Science top academic journals, our paper presents a bibliometric co-occurrence and co-authorship analysis of both software ecosystems and digital platforms. The results show that software ecosystems and digital platforms research collide based on the key words co-occurrence analysis under a certain degree, underlying the evolution of the two topics towards platform ecosystem and platform economy research in recent years.