Strategies to Foster Software Ecosystem Partnerships - A System Dynamics Analysis

摘要

Software ecosystems originate in the idea of business ecosystems, as a collection of relationships among actors in an economic community. They represent the current functioning of the IT industry, in which companies co-create innovations and extend their solutions by means of partnerships. This research investigates the driving factors of relationships in a software ecosystem. To address this goal, we performed multiple case studies of two emerging software ecosystems formed by Small-to-Medium Enterprises. Based on evidence from twenty-seven interviews conducted with eight companies, we analysed the main facilitators and barriers for their partnerships to thrive. We used System Dynamics method to identify cause-effect relations among these factors. The resulting dynamic models enabled us to map key factors and interactions to propose four strategies that promote software ecosystems health. We believe that practitioners can benefit from this synthesis by understanding the facilitators to reinforce and barriers to restrain, as a means to catalyse the success of their networks. In addition, we demonstrate for researchers the utility of System Dynamics to provide a diagnostic of relevant scenarios.