Digital Transformation of Business Ecosystems

A special issue of Systems (ISSN 2079-8954). This special issue belongs to the section "Systems Practice in Social Science".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 October 2026 | Viewed by 590

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Faculty of Management, National University of Political Studies and Public Administration, Bucharest, Romania
Interests: strategic management; digital transformation

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Guest Editor
Business Administration Department, Bucharest Business University ASE, Bucharest, Romania
Interests: business strategies; digital transformation
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Business ecosystems are becoming ubiquitous in today’s economy: digital technologies have made the development of collaboration models easier than ever, enabling enterprises to connect, share resources, and innovate across boundaries. This evolution compels firms to rethink how they build partnerships, not only by adopting new instruments but also by adjusting their organizational cultures and business practices.

As business ecosystems develop in the digitalized interdependent environment, relationships between actors are becoming more sophisticated, shaped by overlapping interests, converging and diverging objectives, and a growing range of participants. The expansion of advanced digital technologies intensifies interactions between multiple actors in a multitude of evolving roles, innovators, integrators, enablers, users, complementors, and regulators, which raises the need for the strategic orchestration of business ecosystems to ensure consistency and shared growth while balancing competition and collaboration. The large-scale adoption of advanced digital instruments such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing, blockchain, the Internet of Things, and automation technologies reshapes how actors interact, create and capture value. Understanding these ongoing transformations is essential to capture the future impact of the digital transformation of business ecosystems.

This Special Issue seeks to compile original research that captures the present landscape and explores the emerging scenarios for business ecosystems, considering actors at different phases of their digital transformation and the diverse roles they play in this evolving environment.

We look forward to receiving your contributions and advancing the understanding and practice of this phenomenon.

Prof. Dr. Florina Pînzaru
Dr. Anagnoste Sorin
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • digital transformation
  • business ecosystem
  • ecosystem governance
  • coopetition
  • digital technologies

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

29 pages, 5599 KB  
Article
Self-Organizing Skill Networks in Emerging Work Systems: Evidence from the Platform-Mediated Digital Nomad Economy
by Tianhe Jiang
Systems 2026, 14(3), 290; https://doi.org/10.3390/systems14030290 - 9 Mar 2026
Viewed by 229
Abstract
The digital nomad economy—the ecosystem in which professional skills are traded through online platforms independent of geographic co-location—dynamically recombines skills into project-based portfolios with absent firm-level hierarchy. Yet it remains shaped by platform taxonomies, interfaces, and ranking/recommendation incentives. This study examines the emergent [...] Read more.
The digital nomad economy—the ecosystem in which professional skills are traded through online platforms independent of geographic co-location—dynamically recombines skills into project-based portfolios with absent firm-level hierarchy. Yet it remains shaped by platform taxonomies, interfaces, and ranking/recommendation incentives. This study examines the emergent structure within this setting using the Semantic-Structural Systems Analysis (S2SA) framework, which integrates LLM-assisted skill extraction, transformer-based semantic embeddings, and multi-layer network analysis. We analyze a dual-source dataset comprising approximately 50,000 public Upwork profiles from a top-rated/high-earning segment (January–March 2023) and 2.0 million Reddit posts and comments (2018–2023) from remote-work and digital-nomad communities. The resulting skill network exhibits a pronounced core–periphery organization and modular “skill ecotopes” corresponding to coherent functional specializations. In predictive models of skill-level effective hourly rates, semantic brokerage and semantic diversity function as robust predictors of higher rates, significantly outperforming popularity-only baselines. Longitudinal discourse analyses surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic and the generative AI shock reveal rapid attentional shifts followed by the emergence and recombination of new skill clusters. We interpret these results as evidence consistent with constrained self-organization in platform-mediated labor markets. To support replication, prompts, parameters, and robustness checks are fully reported. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Digital Transformation of Business Ecosystems)
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