Abstract

Business ecosystem (BE) emerges as a quite popular terminology capturing many inspirational imaginations in both industry and academic worlds in the last five years. But, for many operations management scholars, especially the people working in supply chain and value network areas, business ecosystem might be just another buzz word or better analogy without real deep insights and theoretical potential. Is this true? This talk seeks to wrap up some interesting case studies conducted in CIM and to demonstrate some differences between classical operations management theories and emerging business ecosystem focus. The talk has three part: (1) it very briefly reviews some PhD and research projects in the BE area in the last five years; (2) it tries to provide some thoughts for deeply understanding BE; (3) it discusses the BE impacts on operations management and IfM. The seminar hopes to attract more debates on business ecosystem in IfM and to gain more suggestions from you for BE research and development.