The Evolution of Digital Ecosystems: A Case of WordPress from 2004 to 2014~1 Completed Research Paper

摘要

Digital ecosystems are dynamic: they grow and evolve as new firms join the ecosystem. Yet, the way they evolve over time is not clearly understood. We draw on an evolutionary network approach to explore the evolutionary pattern of a digital ecosystem. In particular, we discover that the changing combination of existing digital components, interaction of which forms a complex bipartite network, drive the changes in the topological structure of a digital ecosystem over time. To formally test our ideas, we hypothesize the impact of network properties on the evolution of a digital ecosystem, and test them using a data set collected from WordPress.org. We used text mining on the source code data of WordPress plug-ins created from 2004 to 2014 and extracted the list of all API (Application Programming interface) used in these plug-ins. We then explore how the changes in the pattern of combinations of APIs drive the generativity of the platform as new plug-ins continue to emerge in the ecosystem over time. Our findings suggest that the evolution of a digital ecosystem represents a distinct structural interaction derived from the generative nature of APIs. A structural analysis shows that the rate of innovation does not necessarily increase though the number of APIs in a digital ecosystem increases.