ECOSYSTEM TYPES IN INFORMATION SYSTEMS.

As of now, the academic community puts increasing attention on the ecosystem concept. Subsequently, a plethora of ecosystem conceptualizations emerges blurring the concept and making accurate utilization increasingly difficult. To address that issue, the study reports on an in-depth structured literature review following established, rigorous guidelines, with the goal in mind to structure and analyze the differing ecosystem conceptualizations and to produce a harmonized understanding of them. Based on the identified literature, we inductively derive mandatory and differentiating characteristics that are suitable to explain ecosystem configurations. Next, we use established clustering procedures to identify groups of ecosystems from the literature. From that, we propose five idealized types of ecosystems. The goal of the study is to provide the research community and practitioners with a conceptually sound understanding of different ecosystem types and, thus, giving them a tool to develop their own ecosystem approaches on them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]