Analyzing the impact of industry sectors on the composition of business ecosystem: A combined approach using ARM and DEMATEL

The study proposes a new approach to analyze the impact of industry sectors on the composition of business ecosystems from an industry-wide perspective based on data on strategic alliances and joint ventures. In this study, ARM (association rule mining) is adopted as a basis to construct an inter-industry knowledge flow matrix that represents interactions among industry sectors involved in inter-firm relationships, and the DEMATEL (decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory) technique is used to determine the specific characteristics of the resulting inter-industry interactions, such as impact and cause effect relationships. Moreover, centrality-based indicators are introduced to categorize the specific roles of industry sectors by means of social network analysis. The approach is a good complement to the patent-dominated methodological tools to analyzing interdisciplinary convergence trends and exploring the structure of overall business ecosystem. Additionally, it will help policy makers to develop effective policies for maintaining balanced resource flows across sectors and for developing sustainable ecosystem structure. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.