A Modeling Tool for Exploring Business Ecosystems in a (Pre-)conceptual Phase

When modeling real-world activities involving social, economic, and technical aspects, conceptual modeling is a necessary prerequisite to set the stage and define the system boundaries. This can become a very difficult task, however, especially when all the relevant actors, shareholders, and stakeholders together with their intrinsic and extrinsic motivations are not known. One of the methodological challenges in this is to provide a unified framework for collecting as many relevant perspectives and pieces of information as possible for creating a fully comprehensive representation that is both insightful and readily understood. Another challenge is to transform these findings into standardized and re-usable information which can serve as input for other modeling tools downstream in the tool chain. In this chapter, we will present both a methodology based on value networks and a modeling tool (EcoViz), which is intended to address these issues and can also be used directly before the typical conceptual modeling starts in the course of a “pre-conceptual phase.” We will also show how the identified interactions can be used for an insightful qualitative analysis and exploration of socio-technical ecosystems. To demonstrate how and where EcoViz can be applied, we will show four real-world cases from different domains.