A Maturity Model for Digital Business Ecosystems from an IT Perspective

Digital transformation impacts longstanding business models and enables enterprises to create new ones. This transformation leads to increased competition that forces enterprises to compete, not only between companies but also between the entire supply chain and business networks. The emerging concept of digital business ecosystems (DBE) allows enterprises to concentrate on network co-creation and co-evolution of bundled services and products across enterprise boundaries. This exploratory study introduces a maturity model derived from existing DBEs. Based on employing a design science methodology, we reviewed 22 scientific publications, interviewed 28 senior experts from practice and derived a maturity model from the results. We applied the maturity model through an online survey to 29 DBEs from different industry sectors and compared it with 22 maturity assessment approaches from other domains. The maturity model enables researchers to compare and assess existing DBEs and helps practitioners to identify areas for improvement in the collaboration within DBEs.