The Co-Evolution of Digital Ecosystems

Digital ecosystems continue to evolve, as new external APIs continue to enter into it. Not all new APIs, however, have the same fate: some are successfully connected with existing APIs and spark major changes in the ecosystem, while others are simply ignored. Particularly, some of the components end up playing a major role in shaping the structure of the ecosystem. To systematically explore what determines the fate of different APIs, we hypothesize how the network property and non-network property of external APIs affect the probability of the APIs becoming a part of the newly generated structure of a digital ecosystem. For the empirical test, we used plug-in source code data collected from Wordpress.org from January 2004 to December 2014. Using a survival analysis, we found that external APIs are more influential than APIs offered by a focal platform system in the growth of a digital ecosystem

The Evolution of Digital Ecosystems: A Case of WordPress from 2004 to 2014

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 plug-in data set collected from WordPress.org. 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