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Top1. Introduction
Many regions of the world are seeking innovative solutions to cope with some kind of regional crisis. What makes business sense is not independent of the continuously evolving regional socio-economic environment. The authors are researching possibilities in the Gippsland region of Australia, which is similar in size to Switzerland or the Netherlands but with less than 5% of the population of those nations. Achieving a ‘critical mass’ of actors supporting a regional business ecosystem may be problematic. The region has been impacted by climate change, by reductions in the use of its coal resources, and more recently by Covid 19 pandemic restrictions constraining its tourism sector. One government response is to support enhancement of regional innovation and embrace emergent technologies. One entrepreneurial grassroots response is to explore technology-enabled business models drawing on local social networks. Both involve working across geographic, institutional, technological and social boundaries in linking with a broader business ecosystem.
There has been a developing interest in the business ecosystem concept since foundation articles appeared in the 1990s (e.g. Moore, 1993; Kandiah and Gossain, 1998). In the 2000s there was a tenfold increase in the number of articles and in the 2010s there was another tenfold increase on top of that. Some articles emphasised the evolutionary nature of business ecosystems and the introduction of a platform strategy (e.g. Moore, 1993; de Vasconcelos Gomes et al, 2018). Some see the nature of engagement with the business ecosystem involving matters of strategic choice (Mäkinen and Dedehayir, 2012; Tafti et al, 2015). Some see this as a necessity for survival. A review of emerging business research by Rong et al (2018) suggested that studies of inter-organizational interactions have progressively changed focus from an enterprise orientation looking at the role of supply chains, towards a complete business ecosystem perspective. They proposed three ecosystem future research directions to consider perceived gaps: exploring evolutionary dynamics, enterprise embeddedness and internationalization. A review of entrepreneurial ecosystems research supporting business development by Velt et al (2020) identified six themes being pursued by researchers and suggested future research could be more narrowly focused on the country level. The six themes identified (and associated subthemes) were: (1) complexity perspective (emergence, formation, micro-foundations); (2) context perspective (genesis, policy, digital/special dimensions, intermediary and financial actors); (3) governance perspective (lineages, institutions, knowledge, culture); (4) geography perspective (location, performance elements); (5) agency perspective (individual and collective agency, interdependent stakeholders); (6) network perspective (interacting networks, social capital).