Guest Editorial: Collaboration and Innovation Dynamics in Software Ecosystems

The five papers in this special section focus on collaboration and innovation dynamics in software ecosystems. Over the past years, there has been an exponential growth in the number of articles mentioning “ecosystem” as their topic, and among them, ecosystems in the context of information and communication technologies have received particular attention . Much of this research is motivated by the intuition that ecosystems facilitate innovation. Yet, despite this burgeoning research activity accompanied by a flourish of reviews, actual empirical investigations of the collaboration and innovation dynamics in an ecosystem in general and in software ecosystems specifically remain few and far between.