Recently, the research output of the team led by Professor Chunhong Liu at the Glorious Sun School of Business and Management and the Shanghai International Fashion Innovation Center of Donghua University, entitled "The Evolutionary Mechanism of Digital Business Ecosystems: An Actor-Network Theory Perspective", was published in Management World, a top-tier journal in the field of management, and the team was invited to record a lecture video for the "Management World Lecture Hall". The article embodies the research team's years of theoretical exploration and academic accumulation in the field of digital business ecosystems. This publication represents another important achievement of high-level academic output in the management discipline of Donghua University.
Digital business ecosystems, through digital connectivity and open collaboration, break through resource constraints and organizational boundaries, and have become a new organizational form that promotes value co-creation and the development of strategic emerging industries. Driven by both the deepening of national strategies and the generational leap of digital technologies, a deep understanding of their evolutionary mechanisms is the key foundation for unleashing the potential of such ecosystems. Adopting a literature review method based on grounded theory, the article systematically reviewed 123 representative publications on digital business ecosystems, and leveraged the unique advantages of actor-network theory in the structural analysis of multi-agent collaborative networks to construct a systematic, dynamic, and hierarchical theoretical framework revealing the evolution of digital business ecosystems from micro-level interactions to macro-level transitions.
This study reveals the dynamic mechanisms of synergistic evolution of digital business ecosystems, providing practical guidance for enterprises transitioning from traditional linear management to open ecosystem-oriented collaborative management, and offering a theoretical reference for governments in formulating industrial policies. Enterprises should implement full-life-cycle dynamic governance and targeted policies, deepen the mutual-construction effect of digital-real integration, reshape value creation logic, and cultivate organizational resilience oriented toward new quality productive forces to achieve high-quality and sustainable development. Meanwhile, policies should focus on digital infrastructure, the marketization of data elements, and digital security, promote the construction of cross-industry digital collaboration ecosystems, optimize the orientation and implementation paths of industrial policies, and drive the formation of a virtuous cycle of risk sharing and value co-creation in digital ecosystems, injecting sustained momentum into the digital economy. Grounded in China's digital business ecosystem practices, this study expects, with the academic self-awareness of "seeking within", to extract original theoretical insights from the local experience of China's digital economy development, contributing foundational thinking to the construction of Chinese management theories rooted in China's soil and capable of international dialogue.
Management World is an academic journal in economics and management, supervised and sponsored by the Development Research Center of the State Council, and is known as the only "top-tier journal" in the field of management in China, with a composite impact factor of 37.304 in 2025. The "Management World Lecture Hall" is a program initiated by Management World magazine with the mission of "disseminating excellent academic achievements, facilitating academic research, and leading academic frontiers", inviting outstanding paper authors to record lecture videos. Professor Chunhong Liu is the first author of the paper, PhD candidate Lin He is the corresponding author, and Donghua University is the sole corresponding affiliation.
Paper link: https://doi.org/10.19744/j.cnki.11-1235/f.2026.0076
