Innovation processes in business ecosystems: Creating a common understanding by requirements

In established supply chains, companies use specific requirement standards to coordinate product development activities. In recent years, companies like Apple and Google have focused on creating and controlling business ecosystems that integrate actors also from other industries in their innovation processes. These ecosystems are characterized by a different way of communicating requirements necessary to achieve successful collaboration in a joined innovation process. In this paper, we endeavor to identify those factors which emerge as important in how requirements are communicated in the ecosystem setting to provide stable and predictable operations. To this end, we explore four ecosystems displaying different product innovation traits and seek the variables that determine the manner in which requirements are communicated in business ecosystems. Our explorative work leads to central propositions, which we offer as the focus of future extensions of our work.