The Radical Shift: From Industry to Ecosystem: A New Paradigm for Innovation-driven Global Markets

An increasing problematic of the present economic structure is the thinking in terms of industries. As research has shown, industrial structures are dissolving and together with this dissolution theoretical frameworks developed during the era of the physical place become rapidly irrelevant in times of a dominant shift towards the virtual space. The new conceptual approach differentiates between dependent interactions of products, infrastructure and the ecosystem. This concept gains importance, if the present turbulences on markets and those within national economies want to be understood.
The ‘Gang of Four’ (Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google) is continuously outperforming traditional enterprises, since they do not think in terms of outdated cost leadership or differentiation strategies anymore. Path-dependent organisational thinking creates problems in a world, which shifts towards keystone, niche and dominator strategies being based on platform innovation of the Internet. These developments require cross-functional research in which, e.g., biology is an important contributor towards the economic understanding of an ecosystem for which a precise definition is still missing.

This paper introduces to ongoing research which presently analyses and processes case-specific data, whose objective it is to lead towards a more precise understanding of the economic ecosystem.

Keywords: Ecosystem, platform innovation, keystone, niche and dominator strategies, industrial renewal.