Digital Ecosystem - History

History

The concept of Digital Business Ecosystem was put forward in 2002 by a group of European researchers and practitioners, including Francesco Nachira, Paolo Dini and Andrea Nicolai, who applied the general notion of digital ecosystems to model the process of adoption and development of ICT-based products and services in competitive, highly fragmented markets like the European one.

A major step in understanding digital ecosystems, particularly in the context of the Internet, was the publication of the ecological cognition framework in 2007. Level 1 of the framework describes what drives individuals to carry out actions in online communities such as posting messages and adding content. Level 2 looks at the cognitions they use to determine whether or not to take such actions. Level 3 looks at the means by which they go about carrying out the action in the environment. Researchers have found it to be useful for understanding active participation in online communities and what instigates the user to desire to take part within the digital ecosystems that exist online

In the same year 2007 three computer science researchers, Elizabeth Chang, Ernesto Damiani and Tharam Dillon, started in Cairns, Australia the annual IEEE International Conference on Digital Ecosystems and Technologies, bringing together the activities on socio-economic models of Digital Business Ecosystems with the investigations on computational models of service-oriented applications. Since then, a large interdisciplinary research community has gradually gathered around the Digital Ecosystem idea, organizing other important regular events like the ACM Conference on the Management of Emergent Digital Ecosystems (MEDES).