Towards Design Principles for Visualizing Business Ecosystems

Abstract

Business ecosystems have recently gained relevance as a reference frame in which firms entertain diverse relationships to develop, produce, and distribute services and products. Only little research however has looked at how to visualize business ecosystems—although visualizations might provide a helpful instrument for firms to position themselves and manage their interactions within their ecosystem. We report from a systematic mapping study that identified 17 types of visualizations used in the business ecosystem context. On basis of this study, we derive requirements and design principles for Visual Analytic Systems (VAS). We discuss some limitations of current VAS with respect to the question how VAS can support management tasks related to business ecosystems, and we provide an outlook on the role of VAS in supporting business ecosystem governance.