Software ecosystems now and in the future: A definition, systematic literature review, and integration into the business and digital ecosystem literature

Business settings and ecosystems have in the past three decades been transformed by software utilization. It is being applied in several industries shaping innovation – platforms – and business characteristics, thus attracting ever more interest from both practitioners and researchers. During the last ten years, research on software ecosystems (SECOs) has expanded, and is strongly related to the development of digital ecosystems. This expansion has led to the need to review the status of software ecosystem research, and the present study provides a state-of-the-art literature review on the topic. We explain the connection between the relatively new research field of software ecosystems and the traditional streams of ecosystem research. This paper contributes novel definitions of software ecosystems, and software ecosystem configuration, and proposes a theoretical model illustrating the relationship between vital contingency categories and processes. We identify significant research gaps and present a future research agenda.