Engineering Business Ecosystems Using Environment-Mediated Interactions

The increasingly complex and dynamic nature of contemporary markets demands that a business engages in an ongoing dialogue with all aspects of its environment, including other businesses. Whilst the concept of a “business ecosystem” captures the essence of such an environment, the lack of both a convincing model and a proper architecture has resulted in software which only partially leverages the potential of the metaphor. In this paper, we present a conceptual architecture for an environment-mediated business ecosystem: Dynamic Agent-based Ecosystem Model (DAEM), a novel and promising approach to model business ecosystems, especially, those in which the environment plays an identifiable mediating role.