An Exploratory Study on the Sustainability of Emerging Small-to-Medium Enterprises Ecosystems
Pillar Benedetti Vasconcellos Luz, Juliana Costa Fernandes, George Valença, Rodrigo Pereira dos Santos · 2018
A recent trend of small-to-medium enterprises (SME) is their close collaboration to create new products and reach new market niches. In this context, sustainability emerges as an important requirement of an ecosystem formed by companies (actors), mainly thinking of its longevity and survival. In this paper, we modeled and analyzed a real case of an emerging SME software ecosystem (SECO) based on a system sustainability framework in order to model and analyze sustainability as a SECO requirement. We also applied a set of SECO factors to the produced model, considering existing relationships between actors. Results demonstrate the importance of analyzing this requirement to assist an emerging SECO from the beginning, but also show the difficulty in treating sustainability as a requirement.