Framework for Analysis of Multi-party Collaboration

In recent years, platforms have become important for allowing ecosystems to emerge that allow users to collaborate and create unprecedented forms of innovation. For the platform provider, the ecosystem represents a massive business opportunity if the platform succeeds to make the collaborations among the users value-creating and to facilitate trust. While the requirements flow for evolving existing ecosystems is understood, it is unclear how to analyse an ecosystem that is to be. In this paper, we draw on recent work on collaboration modelling in requirements engineering and propose an integrated framework for the analysis of multi-party collaboration that is to be supported by a platform. Drawing on a real-world case, we describe how the framework is applied and the results that have been obtained with it. The results indicate that the framework was useful to understand the ecosystem context for a planned platform in the domain of artificial intelligence, allowed identification of platform requirements and offered a basis to plan validation.