The business ecosystem concept has generated great interest from both strategic management researchers and practitioners over the last twenty years. Many strategic management theorists have explored the remarkable benefits of this model as well as its attendant weaknesses. The objective of this paper is to examine this business model from a wider perspective. In order to understand this new ecosystem business model, it is important to first compare it with the prevailing Chandlerian model of the previous century. This paper therefore presents a comparative analysis of the open-innovation oriented, network-based ecosystem model and the closed-innovation oriented, integrated-hierarchy model. The implication of this study is that augmenting the business as ecosystem model with theoretical constructs from the field of dynamic capabilities can be effective in redressing its characteristic shortcomings such as the problem of coordination costs between organizations.

The business as ecosystem model has attracted considerable attention from both academics andpractitioners as advances in information technology have enabled new forms of organization and value creation. This paper seeks to explore the dynamics of business ecosystems by drawing upon theoretical traditions related to ecosystems from the fields of ecology, sociology and stakeholder theory. We identify scope, governance, social value and change management as key dimensions in the design of effective business ecosystems. Based upon these four dimensions we propose a conceptual framework by which business ecosystems can be planned, implemented and evaluated.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the importance of ethics in business ecosystem development.However, the concept of business ecosystem is ambiguous as an analytical framework. Therefore, in this paper, we first consider the definition of ecosystem. Next, as an example of the ethics of the ecosystem, we will introduce the case of the Hollerith machine in the pre-computer age. In this section, it is shown that the construction process of the ecosystem itself is a social construction process of values or ethics. Finally, a new definition of the platform, “the place of redefinition of the value of the provided product / service” is proposed, and it is clarified that the success factor of the platform is “value”. The conclusion of this article is that authenticity (a broad sense of ethics) is important to establish platform value.

Process of value creation has been mainly described by the concept of value chain, but platforms are becoming new important basis of value creation. However, value creation on platforms may not be sustainable if platformers will monopolize the profit. The concept of value co-creation on business ecosystem supports the idea that platformers and suppliers of complementary products and services are interdependent and share the profit. Suppliers also can be the sources of innovation on ecosystem. We applied this idea to the elder care business in Japan, and proved that this idea is helpful to promote innovations and provide solutions in important issues like elder care.

This study employs context change methods to investigate new possibilities for management models based on ecosystems, which is this issue’s theme. The study can thus be considered a context-driven examination of the creation of business models rather than an examination of ecosystems themselves. Specifically, we discuss the context change in traditional interpretations of ecosystems, the direction of ecosystems understood from these interpretations, and the resulting context change in management models. We use examples of context change in models for strategy, organizational human resources, and marketing. Furthermore, we discuss the systematization of context change for business models that are based on the understanding of ecosystems.

We present a case of a sustainable ecosystem integrated with education, research and social contribution　on a business-academia collaboration. This paper introduces detailed construction process of the ecosystem. Furthermore, based on this case, we examined necessary requirements to realize the ecosystem from a viewpoint of social network. As a result, with consideration of features of organizations as well as individual ability as the key factor, it was proved that mutual assistance, as a business opportunity, with mutual exchange of resources along with knowledge and information should be required to construct a sustainable social network.

Ecosystem studies cover environmental, social and business issues. Business ecosystem research has branched out into IT, platform, marketing, and innovation related fields. These fields are deeply related to environmental and social ecosystem studies and are not distinct from each other. From a practitionerʼs viewpoint, while IT platforms facilitate ecosystem infrastructure construction and the proliferation of digital devices accelerate interactions among ecosystem members, they can also create problems of trust. From an academic viewpoint, empirical model building when incorporating the concept of double-contingency and familiarity has proved to be problematic. Based upon a comprehensive review of the current theory, this study proposes that: new forms of whole systems (ecosystems) can be efficiently and effectively created by strengthening the mutual trust between members and thereby resolving the risk and uncertainty due to double contingency.

Recently, many local governments have tackled tourism promotion with the increase of foreign tourists visiting Japan. It is necessary to grasp the commonness and the difference of impression for capturing consumption by domestic tourists as well as foreign tourists. In this paper, we proposed a framework for the comparison of tourists’ impression and analyzed Word-of-mouth posted on English, Chinese and Japanese on the internet for tourist facilities in Nagoya City. As a result, it was found quantitatively that there are the commonness and the difference in tourists’ impression on tourist facilities between tourists of each language.

Specific few kinds of microorganisms are used in manufacture of food processing enzymes withrecombinant DNA technology, because of social concern to it in food areas. Moreover, increase of allergen information under ex post manner with a progress of allergy research suppresses the development of novel production technologies. The technological trajectories to produce them are self-reinforced not only with technological factors or demand factors but also with science-derived risk information. A novel production technology using Schizosaccharomyces pombe was developed to produce a recombinant phytase for livestock feed, by avoiding the ambiguity of allergen information in food processing enzymes.